Pocket Spacecraft launches crowdsourced lunar mission on Kickstarter (video)
As space exploration becomes democratized, the entry price for such endeavors has fallen dramatically. One company taking advantage of this is Pocket Spacecraft, a Bristol-based enterprise that thinks it can send thousands of personalized probes to the heavens for a few hundred dollars apiece. While it may look more like a used coffee filter, the Earth Scout / Lunar Scout is a CD-sized, paper-thin probe that contains a bonded solar cell, system-on-a-chip and antennas. Several thousand of these will be loaded onto a CubeSat and then dropped onto Earth or the Moon, depending on your project and contribution. Users who cough up the cash will then be able to observe how thin, papery probes journey downward, with telemetry being sent to an Android / iOS app. Anyone interested in backing the project on Kickstarter should check out the video after the break and then empty their savings of £99 ($150) to buy an Earth scout or £199 ($302) if they intend to explore the Moon.
