Ultra Light Space Flight

Many people around the world are doing ultra light space flight: flying small robotic spacecraft at altitudes greater than 100 km.

Some are commercial, but many are individuals and groups. Perhaps the first were the amateur radio operators, flying satellites in Low Earth Orbit for communications relays. Some of the most recent are flying cubesats.

For me, the efforts of individuals and groups flying small robotic missions is the hallmark of ultra light space flight. So far only to LEO, but the European and American Student Moon Orbiters, and the GLXP, promise to push the enterprise beyond Low Earth Orbit.

The space economy is real. An abundance of solar energy, and materials from the Moon, Mars and Asteroids, are founding components of a plethora of possibilities.

Critical to the development of a new economy is minimizing barriers to entry. Because economies are diverse and require many classes of participants and investments in order to succeed. For the space economy, space flight is overhead. Pure Cost.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the principal barrier to the new world was an ambitious ocean crossing.

Today, the principal barrier to space is the Earth's Gravity Well.  In achieving orbit or better, a space craft escapes the Earth's gravity. The propellant mass required of a rocket is described by Tsiolkovsky's Rocket Equation.

With open internet resources for space flight engineering, the economic barriers are minimized, innovation is propelled, and the general space economy gains another quantum of momentum.

Today, some of the best work being done on open space flight systems is being done by a group of volunteers named Team FREDNET, in pursuit of the GLXP.

For me, the stars of this show include Joshua Tristancho
and Alex Csete.

Joshua is working in a number of areas with his group at UPC, but at the top of the stack he's developing a minimal mass lunar rover named PicoRover.

Alex is also working in a number of areas, but perhaps first most importantly he is developing our knowledge of practical space communications for a ground station.

Together, Team FREDNET is working on the space flight problem daily.

In the world, there's so much more that could be done.