I'm not sure this is really a good fit for a Kickstarter project. I love rockets/space/science/etc and fully support researching cheaper launch methods, but for most people to invest, they want to get something back. There are very few people who will/can donate to something on a purely altruistic basis. These guys aren't a charity and I can't even get a tax write-off. Pushing a button, while cool, is not really a return on investment and only rocketry enthusiasts with extra money (a rare combination) will be willing to pay for that. The cheaper reward tiers offer a "Master-Class on 3d printing and rocket science" which will have more backers due to the 3d printing information but probably not enough to clear their goal.<p>I think a better way to spur investment would be offering a reward tier that gives a portion of the company (i.e., a $x investment gets you a y% stake in the company). This is just selling stock in a company off of Wall Street and probably a better fit for a company that isn't offering services or a physical product to the general public. I'm not sure what kind of regulations you have to follow (or if kickstarter would even allow it) but it would certainly open up the field of potential backers to include the folks that know/care nothing about rockets but would like to make some money when the company is inevitably bought out by a larger space launch company like SpaceX.
I'd be enthusiastic about nano-satallites, if the space-fairing component of human civilization had established reliable processes for keeping low earth orbit clean and free of orbiting pollution, debris and junk.<p>The last thing we need is more high-velocity objects being randomly inserted into orbit by hobbyists, when there's no reliable means to clean up the objects left in orbit by predecessors.<p><a href="http://images.gizmag.com/inline/space-debris-kessler-syndrome-nasa-debrisat-7.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://images.gizmag.com/inline/space-debris-kessler-syndrom...</a><p>How about a startup/kickstarter that harvests existing space junk, instead of one that encourages people to haphazardly produce more?
This is really cool.<p>I would love to see more details about how the engines are 3d printed, and the plans for the designs. Will these engine designs be open sourced?<p>Also, the rewards are a little difficult to parse. A list format would probably be easier to read, rather than one sentence with each reward concatenated to the rest with 'and'. I think having the 'all previous rewards plus ...' is a better format as well, but that is more personal preference.<p>[EDIT]<p>Further, there is no break down of how the money will be used. It seems like 'give us money and we'll do cool things with it' but without any clarification of how much money is really needed to do those cool things.<p>[EDIT2]<p>There is a pretty amazing blog over at Rocket Moonlighting [0] that contains a lot of details around 3d printed rocket engines. Well worth a look.<p>[0] <a href="http://rocketmoonlighting.blogspot.co.nz/" rel="nofollow">http://rocketmoonlighting.blogspot.co.nz/</a>
Pet peeve: this is a spike nozzle, not an aerospike.<p>The aerospike engine has a truncated physical spike that is extended by an "aerospike" that is formed by the pressurized turbine exhaust.<p>It's still crude and early, but it's very nice that people are actually building rocket stuff! Too bad ITAR is a problem...
Hey nadirkazan. With 3D printing, could it be possible and affordable to make really tiny rocket engines for other uses, like radio controlled flying things? I'm thinking something like a moon lander, but smaller (really small, quadrocopter size). I would buy that :)