Of course, the kickstarter/public relations aspect is not essential to all this, but Planetary Resources gets a ton of public interest and they want to capitalize on/engage with people who are interested in their mission to mine asteroids.
-No atmosphere. Seeing would still be a considerable factor; getting 1 arcsecond resolution on Earth is not easy.
-No clouds
-Ability to focus on the same object for an extended exposure
-Infrared
-Can look north and south
There are a lot of advantages to this, even with their aperture size.
30 * 1000 + 3 * 30 * 500 + 3 * 30 * 500 + 10 * 30 * 100 + 25 * 30 * 50 + 25 * 30 * 50 = 225000 minutes = 156.25 days
This is not really a lot. The remaining time will be used by Planetary Resources. There is no way for public to continue using the telescope after that.
The biggest risk of Planetary Resources is that it turns out to be a scam, either accidentally or on purpose.[1]
I think PR could have amazing results for humanity even if the company itself doesn't work out well, so I don't want to sound too negative here.
[1] An accidental scam, in my words, would be something that would never ever work, but they didn't worry too much about it because they were spending someone else's money.
They're not doing this for the Kickstarter money. Even though they're fundraising for the project, they're already putting in more than they could ever hope to raise on Kickstarter.
This project is adjacent to their core mission of Asteroid Mining, this is to prove interest that the public is interested in this sort of project, and to give the public access to the sort of thing that was, previously, impossibly expensive.
For $25 you can get a picture of yourself in space. That's pretty crazy.
Well... A picture of a picture of yourself in space.
While I'm not going to dispute this, I do disagree with it.
> First of all why do they care if public is interested in space? Aren't they after all, looking to run a successful and profitable business?
These goals aren't distinct. What's hard for people to remember is that running a successful and profitable business is a means. It's a how; the real question is what the end goal is. For a painfully large number of businesses, the goal appears to be making the CEO rich. But some groups, some CEOs, some businesses have goals that a lot of us would consider better: actually advancing humanity forward or providing quality service or the like.
I don't know anything about the geosync or Mars sats that the GP is referencing. I'm assuming those were proposed AmSat projects that have never been launched.
Edited to add: A ham license is easy (and cheap) to get. I studied for a few hours and paid about $10 at a local testing facility to get my license (KI6BJU). The equipment is a bit more expensive, but I'm not sure how much it costs for a decent setup because I worked in a lab that already had the equipment.
Once you have a license and equipment, you can talk to other people over the AO-sats and download pictures from scientific satellites. I got my license when I worked in a satellite lab, and we used the equipment to download weather photos from NOAA satellites and helped gather data from other scientific satellites like NASA and various aerospace companies and universities. A lot of satellites have some sort of beacon with a public data format that you can decode.
P4 is a little ambitious so it oscillates over the decades between active and shelved. About two cycles ago it led to phase 3 rev D P3D or whatever aka AO-40 which launched a bit more than a decade ago.
As far as kickstarters go, the AO-40 launch would be kinda ambitious, I guess just the launch alone was five million or so. The boost engine blew up, screwing up the orbit and destroying some uplinks/downlinks, then years later further related failures blew out the DC power bus, and that was it.
Now build like 3 of them and launch them and you're almost guaranteed that at least 2 would work... Just bad luck for AO-40.
There has sporadically been talk of a P5 which would be an interplanetary payload.
I've watched this stuff from the outside for a couple decades, being all volunteer its very cat-herding.
One thing I miss (dating myself pretty severely) is the Russian HF band satellites, requiring no fancy hardware on the ground and no ground computer support. I used to listen to RS-10 morse code telemetry on ten meters using basically normal ham radio shortwave gear, then there was a complicated little decode algorithm to convert raw data into actual data.
Another thing I miss is there are/used to be FM voice "easy sats" requiring pretty basic VHF/UHF FM gear. Very popular. Need more of those. I believe there's only one working ezsat in orbit right now and the hope is the FOX-1 project will deliver another working one later this year.
I also miss the high altitude / 12 hour pass Molinya orbit sats. Thus requiring fancy gear, but the highly elliptical orbits meant you could talk for hours instead of 10 minutes horizon to horizon.
So there's a lot of stuff to google for.
Ham radio is a fun, big hobby. Life's too short to actually do or try everything possible even in just the narrow confines of satellite operation, much less everything else.
