If you want to build a space ship, don’t tax people to collect the money and don’t command them around to do tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the universe. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, paraphrasing. (c/- RecklessPrudence)
[AN: Yeah, I’m pretty darn certain that if you crowd-funded space travel, you would never need to look for money ever again. You’d have people paying for the privilege of working on it, too]
Hi. My name’s Mari Tenso, and I am an enormous nerd. (laughter) As you can guess by my kickstarter title, I’m crowd funding space travel. And to prove I mean business, I’m going to show you this.
(A canister that looks like it could comfortably hold a labrador, with a small nozzle at one end.)
This is my self-contained carbon-fibre spinarette. This one unit can spin a carbon fibre cable strong enough to run a space elevator as conceived by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and popularised by Arthur C. Clarke. Unfortunately, this unit is not large enough to spin a cable long enough to do the full elevator. To give you an idea of scale, this unit spins enough cable to outline two parked city busses.
(A short video begins to play in the corner, showing Mari using the unit to lay the cable around two busses. It’s in time-lapse)
What I need is the funding to super-size this and send it into orbit, with a very small station attached. I already have the designs. I already have the tools. What I lack is the materials and the rocket.
My boring technical specs are in the link below. Warning: contains lots of dull science stuff. Feel free to check my math.
We can get into space without government funding. All donations over five dollars get a golden ticket to ride into space. Biggest donator gets the honorary rank of Admiral and anyone who can donate one thousand dollars gets to be a Captain. Other bonuses in the side, and you don’t get them until your money’s been cleared for my use. I know about donator fraud.
All the details are on this page, including links to the easy-understanding video presentations. Thanks for your time and see you in the stars.
(Two days into her kickstarter, and she already had four times the money she needed just for stage one)
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