From Wikipedia:
The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.
That's not space. Though it's an amazing feat nonetheless.
It's not an artificial boundary. It's the approximate maximum altitude at which winged vehicles have to move faster than the orbital velocity (at that altitude) in order to attain lift (where lift is depending on the pressure at that altitude). A wing moving below orbital velocity and above that altitude will not get lift at any angle of attack, just drag.
I was waiting for the camera to stop picking up sound the whole time. It got really squeaky and full of static towards the peak but it never seemed to happen.
Sound vibrations will still be picked up in a vacuum in this case. Vibrations through the rocket body will be transmitted to the camera body (direct contact) which will then be transmitted to the microphone (again, direct contact). According to Wikipedia[1], 90% of the Earth's atmosphere, by mass, is at an altitude of 52,000 ft or lower.
If you look at the cut open V2 rocket in the Imperial War museum in London you can see about 1/3 of the innards is the control system; gyro's, inertial guidance etc. Today you can buy that on a chips from digi-key, farnell, sparkfun or wherever for say $50 or even just root your smartphone and use it as the control system. It always surprises me that there is very little precision rocketry or ROV proliferation amongst the countries and political/religious movements with extreme agendas out there.
Sending your own widget up and having it bring back snapshots of other continents and a round Earth, only seconds later. What an amazing feeling it must be. Makes me wanna go dig up my old mechanics book. Can someone give a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to build something like this and how long it took them?
You could cheaply reach the same altitude using a helium balloon. 121,000 ft is only 37km. Plenty of home grown helium balloons have reached that height (and higher).
$200 to $300 depending on how much you scrounge from people. I spent more because I decided to do my radio ham qualification in parallel and buy some gear for that.
Most of the gear I used in the capsule was cheap (camera from eBay, Arduino, strip board, polystyrene box). Paid real money for the balloon, parachute and helium.
EDIT: As the parent comment was deleted: this was in reply to a question asking about the approximate cost of something like GAGA-1.
I'm surprised they didn't specifically seek out a receiver that implemented the rule correctly. Since it's an "and", not an "or", a proper receiver should have kicked back in by the time it reached apogee.
I worked at one of the major GPS manufacturers as a hardware/firmware designer and we stopped tracking above a certain altitude and over a certain velocity due to government policy.
I remember one time there was a bug report from a customer complaining that our GPS would not work after mach 2 or some extreme speed. This ended up being a "qualified" foreign government client, so a new firmware version was sent which removed the restriction.
It says here[1] "All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn)[56] are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required. These limits attempt to prevent use of a receiver in a ballistic missile." News to me!
But the rules is that the gps devices needs to record a measurement greater than 100k feet. If that's higher than what GPS satellites can see then no one can win.
First, GPS satellites are in orbit ~20,000 km altitude, so this rocket is nowhere near too high. The beamwidth is pretty wide (it covers the entire half of the Earth, after all). Some quick research shows that below 3–4000km, there isn't much difference. http://emergentspace.com/gps_pubs/SSVP-v1.07-2column.pdf.
You should be able to get exact orbits (to the centimeter!) from the NGS (http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/orbits/), if you're interested.
Second, its the receiver that sees the GPS satellites, not the other way around. The satellites transmit, the receiver does not.
They would have to compensate for artificial curvature introduced by the cameras they are using. If you look at the images you can clearly see that effect.
I don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work.
Build something else. Whatever it is that you build you end up with that awesome "I built that" feeling. Last night I hacked to 0230 on turning a set of 50 GE Color Effects Christmas lights into a 7x7 color display. No one around me really understands why this was worth staying up half the night for, but when I finally got control of the serial bus protocol for programming the lights and saw my display work under my control it was awesome.
At Twin Cities Maker a few of our members are undergoing a project to turn these into a large color changing glass block wall. It's been a pretty cool project to watch.
We used shiftbrites in our 7x8 window at Hive13 adnd it worked out very nicely. Last week we got it working with OSC and Processing - http://www.hive13.org/?p=527 - which should make connecting to it with a wide variety of software pretty easy.
Yes, I will. When I've got it doing something useful I will post a full blog post with details and also with the source code etc.
Some more pictures to give you the idea:
1. All the LEDs removed from the cable and stuck into a specially drilled piece of thin plywood: http://yfrog.com/hwy2snj
2. Reverse of the plywood showing the bulb with all the cables cut. Had to cut, strip and solder all 288 cables back in place: http://yfrog.com/j2xp8gsj
3. Little shot of the rewiring on the back. The colored pieces are tiny bits of heatshrink that I put in place to insulate everything: http://yfrog.com/nzh3ngdj
Related; Copenhagen Suborbitals - homegrown opensource _manned_ rocket: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ - Peter Madsen (one of the two guys building this thing) also built a submarine..
I'm impressed with the machining on this. It looks like he made it at home in his own shop. It looks very solidly welded and bolted together. As an ID student that's the most amazing part for me, the thing had to have been really solid to not just fall apart under that much speed.
Edit: Although I was disappointed by the lettering coming off the side of the shaft and covering the camera lens. Something that would be hard to predict :P
If GPS failed before 100,000 ft (and it looks like any commercial GPS would), what about the altitude charts on the project's homepage?[0] How were they generated? Can that data-gathering method qualify it for the Carmack challenge?
As to how they were generated, the charts are labelled. The first shows raw acceleration data, plus the first and second integrals of that data. The second shows data from a _simulation_, which was tweaked after the flight to approximate more closely data that they do have.
I read that as "dude sends epic homegrown into space." I pictured an enormous plant in a hydroponics research facility, with growth unfettered by gravity...
From Wikipedia: The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.
That's not space. Though it's an amazing feat nonetheless.