[mlyle]

Yup. Actually, I'm advisor for a high school team that was selected by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative to put a satellite in LEO, mostly to do space technology development and demonstration. The growth of rideshare and dedicated small satellite launch missions has been impressive to watch in the past couple of decades.

Getting out of LEO has a lot of challenges; the delta V is expensive, but also survivability away from Earth's thermal radiation and magnetic field gets harder. This has a compounding effect where costs and scope run away; if you need to buy expensive launch, rad-hard hardware and do exotic things for power and heating, you want to amortize the fixed portions of these over more science...