Sandy's Soapbox
In my daytime guise as a mild-mannered rocket scientist and science writer, I found (and wrote about) the $8000 TubeSat picosatellites. That figure includes launch... about a factor of 10 cheaper than any other method of getting to orbit. It enables the 'personal satellite', a satellite flown for non-research, non-scientific, non-engineering purposes. It lets a sufficiently misguided person launch arts and hobbies into space.
A TubeSat lifts 200 grams of payload. That's about 7 ounces. Looked at one way, that's less than half a can of soda. But it's enough to lift an entire Nintendo DS game handheld into orbit. 200 grams can be a lot of electronics.
TubeSats go into a polar orbit, each lasting around 90 minutes. Uplink of commands and downlink of data can be done with amateur HAM radio. If you're in a northern latitude, there's perhaps 9 minutes of contact each orbit for any given location. Total mission lifetime is under 3 months. So, what to fly?
What would make a gaming satellite? I'm stymied. The best I could come up with was a random monster generator, that creates critters based on measurements of the magnetic field of ionosphere and the amount of sunlight seen by the satellite. In essence, monsters generated from realtime orbiting data. Second place goes to an orbiting die roller, for when you absolutely do not trust what your GM rolls.
I did decide to launch something. Called Project Calliope, I'm doing music from space, using a 200 gram instrument in a half-kilogram case launched 312 kilometers up. It'll provide realtime music generated from magnetic and optical sensors translated into MIDI. We'll provide a first cut sonification, and let people remix and reuse it however they want.
But I still muse about a gaming satellite. What 200 grams would you put into orbit?
Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net
For more details about our music satellite, see:
- Project Calliope blog
- InterOrbit TubeSats
- SonicState's coverage of it.
