The article was originally published at The Conversation.
The Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and Oceanography at the University of New South Wales in Australia is named Shane Keating.
Astrophysicist and Science Communicator, The University of Melbourne, opens in a new tab.
Would you like to go to space? It could cost you.
The first fully-private, crewed flight to the International Space Station will take place this month. The price for a seat is US$55 million. The ticket comes with an eight-day stay on the space station, including room and board.
You can fly to the edge of space for a mere US$250,000-500,000, if you choose the cheaper alternatives. The flights last between 10 and 15 minutes, which is barely enough time to have a snack.
Things start to look more affordable if you keep your feet on the ground. Advances in tiny satellite technology have made it possible for small countries, private companies, university researchers, and even do-it-yourself enthusiasts to see Earth.
Scientists study our planet and the universe. Our research spans to space in search of answers to fundamental questions about how our ocean is changing in a warming world, or to study the supermassive black holes beating in the hearts of distant galaxies.
The cost of research can be very high. The final price for the James Webb Space Telescope was US$10 billion after many delays and cost overruns.
Over the course of 20 years, the International Space Station cost US$150 billion, with another US$4 billion each year to keep the lights on.
The cost to build and launch weather satellites, which form the backbone of our space-based observing infrastructure and provide essential measurements for weather forecasting and natural disaster monitoring, can be as high as US$400 million each.
Budgets like these are only available to governments and national space agencies, or a very select club of space-loving billionaires.
democratizing access to space is achieved by more affordable options. A small amount of fuel can be used to launch a small amount of nanosatellites, which are open in new tab.
More than 3,400 missions have been launched since 1998 and are used for disaster response, maritime traffic, crop monitoring, educational applications and more.
Small satellites can be launched in large numbers on a single rocket thanks to the standardization of their shape and size.
10 cm along each side of a cube is a widely used format, which can be built with commercial off-the-shelf electronic components. They were developed in 1999 by two professors in California who wanted graduate students to experience designing, building and operating their own spaceships.
The shape and size were inspired by Beanie Babies, a kind of stuffed toy that came in a 10 cm display case.
In California and New Zealand, there are commercial launch providers. You can build, test, launch and receive data from your own cubesat for less than US$ 200,000.
New ways to explore our planet and beyond have been opened by small satellites.
One project we are involved in uses cubesats and machine learning techniques to monitor sea ice from space. Sea ice is a crucial component of the climate system and improved measurements will help us better understand the impact of climate change.
The UK-Australia Space Bridge program is a collaboration between universities in both countries and a UK-based satellite company. The project was called IceCube.
Satellites are starting to explore beyond our planet. The NASA Insight mission to Mars required real-time communication with the lander during its decent, and that's where the two nanosatellites came in. The first cubesat to the moon will be launched by Rocket Lab in May of 2022.
There is a proposal for a tiny craft to travel to another star. The Breakthough Starshot project wants to launch a fleet of 1,000 spaceships each centimeters in size to the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.37 light-years away. Propelled by ground-based lasers, the spacecraft would sail across the stars for 20 or 30 years and beam back images of the planet.
Satellites are getting smaller with advances in miniaturisation.
The size of a can of soft drink and no bigger than a computer chip are putting space within reach of keen amateurs. It is possible to assemble and launch some for as little as a few hundred dollars.
A company in Finland is experimenting with a more sustainable way to build cubes. New smart satellites, carrying computer chips that are capable of artificial intelligence, can decide what information to send back to Earth instead of sending everything.
Getting to space doesn't have to cost the Earth.
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