How much does it cost to put a rocket into space? Three engineering students at Cambridge University in the UK reckon they'll be able to do it for just £1000 ($1879). And they've just sent a lunchbox-sized aircraft, called Nova 1, into the stratosphere
where it captured some very nice pictures of the Earth and the upper atmosphere.
Nova 1 was carried to an altitude of 32 km beneath a high-altitude helium balloon and snapped more than 800 images
, many like the one above.
The students involved, Carl Morland, Henry Hallam and Robert Fryers, have also released a short video showing the launch
in Cambridge. When the balloon carrying the Nova 1 finally burst due to expansion, a parachute deployed to carry it safely back to Earth.
Nova 1 featured some simple, off-the-shelf technology. This included GSM text messaging as well as radio for communications and an ordinary 5 megapixel camera. The students tracked their payload's descent using telemetry and by simply following it in a car.
Eventually they hope to fit a rocket beneath a balloon and use this to carry their craft to 100 km - the edge of space - all for just £1000. It would be no mean feat. Especially when you consider £1000 is about price of one door handle on the space shuttle. And that Anousheh Ansari just paid 13,245 times that for a tourist trip to the International Space Station
. Good luck guys.