Category Archives: Space participation

An overview of the Maker Movement

April 15, 2015 TopSpacer

HobbySpace.com was founded to make the case to the public that space was not an area only for engineers and scientists in the government and big companies but that there were many real and tangible ways for regular folk to participate in space. AMSAT and student satellite projects, rocketry, space radio, astronomy, and many other space related activities have long involved hands-on building and operation of hardware by enthusiasts and not just specialists. With the cost of access to space dropping, we will see increasing participation of the public with space activities.

Meanwhile, in the past decade the Maker Movement, in a similar spirit, has has sought to convince the public that building and modifying real, tangible things is not just for those with elite knowledge but something they can do as well. Below is an infographic sent to me that outlines what the Maker Movement is all about:

Click to Enlarge Image

A Movement in the Making
Infographic by CustomMade

Events, Space Music, Space participation

Yuri’s Night Space Parties

April 11, 2015 TopSpacer

It’s the weekend for celebrating space travel at a Yuri’s Night Space Party. The annual Yuri’s Night

is a global celebration of humanity’s past, present, and future in space. Yuri’s Night parties and events are held around the world every April in commemoration of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to venture into space on April 12, 1961, and the inaugural launch of the first Space Shuttle on April 12, 1981.

Yuri’s Night events combine space-themed partying with education and outreach. These events can range from an all-night mix of techno and technology at a NASA Center, to a movie showing and stargazing at your local college, to a gathering of friends at a bar or barbecue.

Check for a party in your area at Find a Yuri’s Night event.

Or have a party of your own. Find space-inspired tunes to play in the HobbySpace music section.

DIY space, Rockets, Space participation

Open source space exploration

April 10, 2015 TopSpacer

Lloyd Droppers of Project Earendel writes about various aspects of open source rocket and spacecraft development and about its benefits: Op-ed | Open Source Technology: A New Direction for Space – SpaceNews –

Open source software and hardware are rapidly decreasing the cost required to get systems up and running. A great example of this is NASA’s PhoneSat bus, which used commercial off-the-shelf parts and the Android operating system and reportedly cost only $3,500 to produce. With the use of open source software to design components and open source hardware to test components, the price of system development has the potential to be accessible to many hobbyists and small businesses.

The most important open source documentation in aerospace is probably the Defense Technical Information Center and the NASA Technical Reports Server. While not traditionally thought of as open source, many of the older technical reports (roughly pre-1980) have detailed documentation including drawings, test plans and results sufficient to duplicate the devices and test results, and are in the public domain. NASA also has released a variety of open source software packages on topics ranging from orbit determination to robot vision.

Space Models, Space participation

LEGO ISS replica supported for production model status

April 4, 2015 TopSpacer 1 Comment

A detailed model of the International Space Station was created by Christoph Ruge from LEGO bricks: LEGO Ideas – International Space Station.

The model has gotten the 10000 votes necessary for it to be considered as a LEGO production model for sale: Fan’s LEGO replica of International Space Station soars to 10,000 votes – collectSPACE.

The 10k votes, however, is necessary but not sufficient.

Ruge’s station is only the fourth model of a real spacecraft to qualify for review. Two earlier ideas, Japan’s Hayabusa asteroid sample probe and NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, entered production and were sold. The third, a fan-created version of the Hubble Space Telescope, was not approved by LEGO.

DIY space, Space participation

‘Chicks in Space’ ISS experiment fundraising a success + Burt Rutan film project exceeds Kickstarter goal

March 28, 2015 TopSpacer

Crowd-funding seems to be more than a fad. While many projects don’t meet their fund-raising goals, there continue to be some campaigns that meet or even greatly exceed their goals.

For example, I posted a few times about the Chicks in Space campaign by three high school students to fund an experiment on the Int. Space Station. They have now met their goal of $15,000. The Chicks Are Going To NASA’s International Space Station – NanoRacks –

Houston, TX- March 27, 2015—NanoRacks and DreamUp are happy to announce that the Chicks In Space, the Company’s first student crowd-sourced payload, has raised the required $15,000 to send their payload ‘The Garden of ETON’ to the International Space Station (ISS) via NanoRacks’ Dream-Up educational program.

The Chicks In Space are three sisters, MaryAnn, Lillith, and Adia Buwala, from Tennessee who have always dreamt of researching in space. The young women have completed many NASA challenges, created an after school club for space research, and recently converted their centrifuge plant growth chamber for ISS research. The Chicks’ experiment “The Garden of ETON (Extraterrestrial Organic Nutrition)” is a hydroponic garden developed to function under conditions of microgravity in hopes to learn the best way to grow a renewable food source for long-term space travel.

Continue…

Here’s a new video from the young ladies: