In part one of this micro-series on spaceships within reach, I told you about a few citizen astronauts–kids and adults–who got to the edge of space with a high-altitude weather balloon, an iphone and a chinese food takeout box. A step up from that, in altitude, complexity and yes, expense, is the Tubesat Personal Satellite Kit. For $8000 Interorbital Systems will sell you a kit and launch a .75 kilo cylindrical, okay, hexadecagonal, satellite into low earth orbit, where it will orbit the earth for a few weeks before entering earth’s atmosphere and burning up. (Which is nice since it won’t contribute to the dreaded Earth-isolated ablation cascade). The little satellites can be designed to do a variety of things and have a standard radio (more…)