Launch Party: a crowdfunding revolution ignites the next space race

Von Bengston is building the capsule. Madsen is working on the rocket that will propel it 100 miles up, past the Kármán line dividing Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Every day the pair report to the chilly 300-square-foot workshop, occasionally joined by members of an all-volunteer rogue science army. Von Bengston has a smooth bald head and a soul patch. He talks fast and comes across as chronically happy. Madsen has ultra-blond hair and ears that stick out. They want to prove that anyone can go to space. "This project will not change anything in terms of science," von Bengston said, "but it will change the way we look at human space flight."

Copenhagen Suborbitals has completed three iterations of its spacecraft design, 45 engine tests, and four rocket launches, which were staged in international waters east of Denmark to avoid regulations that might prohibit launching a bespoke space ship.

They scrapped the first test after power failed to a hair dryer used to defrost a liquid oxygen valve. They achieved lift-off for the next test, but the rocket’s trajectory was too low and Mission Control had to cut the engine. A third rocket lost its nose mid-flight. During a test last August, the rocket and capsule started tumbling wildly through the air, then the capsule hit the water without fully deploying its parachutes, crushing the bottom. Copenhagen Suborbitals declared each of these launches a tremendous success.

"You have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself when you’re doing a project like this," said Von Bengston, who likes to say he’s only interested in problems that are potentially unsolvable.

"In the beginning, people were against us," he recalled in a Skype interview conducted from his home office while his small, very blond son climbed over the back of the chair, oblivious to the fact that people once thought his dad was legitimately insane. "They thought it was a complete hoax or media stunt. There have been a couple of incidents where somebody has snitched on us to the [police] because they thought we were laundering money."

Copenhagen Suborbitals established credibility gradually through the press and by tweeting, blogging, and video-sharing every calculation, construction, success, and failure. For example, Von Bengston hosted an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit this week. More than 700 subscribers contribute $20 every month, and roughly the same amount comes in through PayPal donations and merchandise sales. Von Bengston doesn’t know how much they’ve raised so far, but estimated it to be less than half a million dollars. "Money for us is just a nuisance, because you need to just spend it," he said.

The backers do more than click "donate," however. Copenhagen Suborbitals engages about 45 volunteers from its fanbase who specialize in things like radio communications and electrical engineering.

Fans can also come to the shipyard for guided tours or the more casual "open evenings." If the workshop is too far, they can follow the project on YouTube and through von Bengston’s "Rocket Shop" blog, where he regularly solicits help with physics problems. "We reply to every comment," he said. "People are becoming part of the process. This whole project is based on the interest from people and their involvement."

Copenhagen Suborbitals just finished a campaign on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to finance the pressure system for Tycho Deep Space Capsule II, a flight-ready vessel with room for one self-taught astronaut.

"Your donated money for this will go 100 percent into the organization," the pitch says, "and I can guarantee that your donated money will be burned in a blaze of fire and inspiration."

Despite promising that donations will be treated like tinder in a great, uncertain experiment, the campaign raised $10,765 from 212 donors. "You and your project are an inspiration," one backer wrote. "Ad astra." To the stars.

Breaking through the financial frontier

"Have you ever dreamed of having your own spacecraft?"

In the fall of 2011, Zac Manchester, a grad student in aerospace engineering at Cornell, set up a video camera in his basement lab and recorded one minute and 22 seconds of himself smiling nervously and reciting from a script directly into the camera. He then posted the video on Kickstarter, asking for $30,000 to send a satellite to space filled with hundreds of microsatellites. He called the project KickSat.

Manchester and his student research group have been developing tiny satellites equipped with solar cells, a radio transceiver, and a microcontroller with memory and sensors such as a thermometer or camera. For the Kickstarter campaign, Manchester proposed to launch these "ChipSats" into low orbit, where they will take readings and transmit signals for a few days to a few weeks before burning up in the atmosphere.

Backers who pledged at least $300 could take charge of one of the ChipSats and program it to broadcast a five-character message from orbit. For $1,000, they could program the microcontroller and set up a ground station to track the satellite’s position with radio signals. Manchester ended his video with a rallying cry, "Let’s kickstart the personal space age!" He ended up with $74,586, which will enable him to launch three loads of ChipSats instead of one.

KickSat is patient zero of the Kickstarter space movement — the first serious space project to successfully raise funding on the platform. Many grassroots space entrepreneurs cited this campaign as their inspiration; two contacted Manchester to ask him how he did it.

For Manchester, Kickstarter was a last resort. He and his colleagues have been working on the project since 2007. They attempted to get funding from traditional sources, including academic institutions and government agencies like the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and NASA. They were able to get funding for early stage research, but no one wanted to put up the money for a test flight.

"We were met with a lot of conservatism and doubt," he recalled. "The spacecraft industry is really conservative. As a general rule, there’s a saying that ‘it has to fly before it can fly.’ There’s this culture of risk aversion, because people don’t want to try things that are risky because it’s so expensive. ‘Oh, it’s just going to be space junk, you can’t do anything with something this small.’ Long story short, we didn’t get any funding."

Then NASA announced a grant program that would allow research and education satellites to hitch a ride to space on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to deliver supplies to the International Space Station in March. Manchester realized this was his chance. If he and his group could just come up with the money to build the spacecraft, they had a good shot at landing one of the six free spots.

He knew some other scientists who had tried, both successfully and unsuccessfully, to fund their research on Kickstarter. If he promised backers that they could adopt one of the microsatellites, he thought, maybe people would bite.

"Space is inspiring," he said. "It’s one of those things that captures the imagination but it’s not somewhere that ordinary people get to go. There’s space tours, but that’s the domain of millionaires that can afford a $20 million ticket. This is the beginning of trying to put space in the hands of everyday people."

Manchester’s project could still turn out to be space junk. Shajahan Merchant, who gave KickSat the highest possible donation of $10,000, says he wouldn’t mind either way. An accomplished software engineer who now runs a tech consultancy, Merchant was browsing Kickstarter out of curiosity when he came across the KickSat campaign. Skeptical at first, his excitement grew as he dug deeper.

Donating was a no-brainer, and of course he circulated the link among friends. Manchester had offered the privilege of pressing the "big red button" to deploy the satellites as the top reward on his Kickstarter campaign, but Merchant felt he couldn’t deprive the young scientist of the thrill. "We’ll do it together," he said.

Manchester keeps backers updated on every stage of the project, from radio testing to solar cell manufacturing. For Merchant, it’s been quite an education. He and his wife and two children, ages 5 and 8, now sit around the dinner table discussing what five-character message to beam back.

"I feel like a kid, to be honest," he said. "When I tell friends, colleagues and coworkers that I’m backing a space project, their reaction is, 'really? You're supporting a space project? You're not a multi-billionaire.' The ability for me to participate — just that in itself is amazing."