Ask HN: How hard would it be to put a small satellite in orbit?

To get you started, Tsiolkovsky rocket equation:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_equation

I'm not sure if this offer is still active but this will give you an idea of the difficulty: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_i...

Start with Tsiolkovsky equation. Pick a fuel - that determines the speed of exhausting gases. Choose the number of stages - since you're trying to reduce complexity, you can't rely on good mass ratios. Obviously those things are related.

When you'll try to make payload - and rocket - small, you'll find that some parts of the rocket reduce their mass in proportion to the total rocket mass, and some other parts don't. Tanks are usually the biggest parts by mass in an orbital rocket - and they scale down rather well, to a certain limit. Engines, however, could scale worse. That will affect your mass ratio, and at some point your payload will become zero.

This is the main problem with current state of the art in high power rocketry (if you want to launch a satellite, you have to have more than 8 km/s delta-V, and this is enough to qualify it as a high power rocketry). Some parts - like control circuits and some sensors - advanced greatly since late 1950-s, and you can have a whole control system in a really small and a lightweight package. But engines, valves - you'll have to have valves - and, after some point, tanks (because you can't have too thin of a wall without breaking in a real flight) will stop scaling. You'll likely find that it's about the same mass of a rocket which can launch 1/4 kg to orbit or 1 kg to orbit.

Elon Mask proved that $90 millions are enough to build a half-a-ton payload rocket from scratch. May be - may be - $1 million is enough to build and launch a smallest rocket from scratch. Hard to say... but it's definitely more than $100 thousands today.

A rocket would be difficult and prohibitively expensive.

How about a balloon? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929340.300-lowbudget...

Of course that doesn't really get the thing into orbit...

There are services that will send your stuff up for you on rocket launches. I don't remember specifics but I believe they start at about 10K which is pretty reasonable.

Very very very difficult. If you have to ask this question, you don't understand the monumental amount of work required. That's really blunt, but that's kind of how it is.

A better, cheaper option would be to purchase a Cubesat. A lot of privately purchased Cubesats qualify for free transportation through NASA (in fact, there were five of them aboard the most recent SpaceX ISS resupply mission). In terms of cost, effort, etc, this is certainly the cheapest option available to you.

We're trying to solve that problem for smaller payloads (1 - 200kg), using reusable stages. Hit me up via contact info in my profile, and we can chat about it.

EDIT: Forgot words.

"A smaller 45-meter, 350 mm caliber gun was completed for testing purposes, and Bull then started work on the "real" PC-2 machine, a gun that was 150 meters long, weighed 2,100 tonnes, with a bore of one meter (39 inches). It was to be capable of placing a 2,000-kilogram projectile into orbit."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull