[LINK] "Danish Amateurs Hope To Launch Suborbital Rocket Next Week"

[rfmcdonald]

Will, Claus? For different reasons, this Universe Today article (found via 80 Beats) may appeal to each of you.

It’s something like the movie “Astronaut Farmer,” but this is for real. And it’s in Danish. Copenhagen Suborbitals, headed by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, hope to launch the world’s first amateur-built rocket for human space travel. As of this writing, the launch countdown clock on the Copenhagen Suborbitals’ website reads 7 days and 12 hours, which would put the launch on August 30 at about 1300 GMT. This upcoming flight will be an unmanned test flight, but if all goes well, Madsen hopes to be inside the single-passenger capsule named Tycho Brahe for a manned flight in the near future. They have a sea-launch site on the Baltic Sea near Bornholm, Denmark, and their HEAT 1-X rocket is ready to go.

The team has been building their rocket since about 2004. Copenhagen Suborbitals is a non-profit endeavor, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers. Their mission: launch a human being into space. If they are successful, Denmark would become only the fourth nation to send a human into space. But this project is completely private – no national funds have been used. “We are working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles – designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft,” said Madsen and von Bengtson on their website.

The Hybrid Exo Atmospheric Transporter or HEAT, is their booster rocket. It stands about 9 meters high, and it is a real scale rocket with a 640 mm diameter tube and uses liquid oxygen (LOX) for fuel. The HEAT booster will burn for about 60 seconds, providing 40kN of thrust, resulting in less than 3-g making the trip feasible for humans to endure in an upright position.

The booster was successfully test-fired in February and May 2010. Copenhagen Suborbitals has also built three other rockets and successfully tested and flown them, including a small unmanned sounding rocket, named Hybrid Atmospheric Test Vehicle or HATV and smaller versions of the HEAT rocket.