| Some google targets would revolve around amsat phase 4 p4 phase IV. P4 is a little ambitious so it oscillates over the decades between active and shelved. About two cycles ago it led to phase 3 rev D P3D or whatever aka AO-40 which launched a bit more than a decade ago. As far as kickstarters go, the AO-40 launch would be kinda ambitious, I guess just the launch alone was five million or so. The boost engine blew up, screwing up the orbit and destroying some uplinks/downlinks, then years later further related failures blew out the DC power bus, and that was it. Now build like 3 of them and launch them and you're almost guaranteed that at least 2 would work... Just bad luck for AO-40. There has sporadically been talk of a P5 which would be an interplanetary payload. I've watched this stuff from the outside for a couple decades, being all volunteer its very cat-herding. One thing I miss (dating myself pretty severely) is the Russian HF band satellites, requiring no fancy hardware on the ground and no ground computer support. I used to listen to RS-10 morse code telemetry on ten meters using basically normal ham radio shortwave gear, then there was a complicated little decode algorithm to convert raw data into actual data. Another thing I miss is there are/used to be FM voice "easy sats" requiring pretty basic VHF/UHF FM gear. Very popular. Need more of those. I believe there's only one working ezsat in orbit right now and the hope is the FOX-1 project will deliver another working one later this year. I also miss the high altitude / 12 hour pass Molinya orbit sats. Thus requiring fancy gear, but the highly elliptical orbits meant you could talk for hours instead of 10 minutes horizon to horizon. So there's a lot of stuff to google for. Ham radio is a fun, big hobby. Life's too short to actually do or try everything possible even in just the narrow confines of satellite operation, much less everything else. |