Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet (opens in new tab)

121,000 feet = 36.88 km

From Wikipedia: The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

That's not space. Though it's an amazing feat nonetheless.

If you look at the cut open V2 rocket in the Imperial War museum in London you can see about 1/3 of the innards is the control system; gyro's, inertial guidance etc. Today you can buy that on a chips from digi-key, farnell, sparkfun or wherever for say $50 or even just root your smartphone and use it as the control system. It always surprises me that there is very little precision rocketry or ROV proliferation amongst the countries and political/religious movements with extreme agendas out there.

Sending your own widget up and having it bring back snapshots of other continents and a round Earth, only seconds later. What an amazing feeling it must be. Makes me wanna go dig up my old mechanics book. Can someone give a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to build something like this and how long it took them?

"As the GPS devices on Qu8k failed to log readings above 100,000 feet, the attempt is likely disqualified."

would love to know what happened

Can't they confirm that the altitude met the contest minimum based on how much earth curvature there is in the photos?

I don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work.

Awesome job

Related; Copenhagen Suborbitals - homegrown opensource _manned_ rocket: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ - Peter Madsen (one of the two guys building this thing) also built a submarine..

Edit: June launch attempt http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K... http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/contentgfx/Rocket-2011_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_suborbitals

I'm impressed with the machining on this. It looks like he made it at home in his own shop. It looks very solidly welded and bolted together. As an ID student that's the most amazing part for me, the thing had to have been really solid to not just fall apart under that much speed. Edit: Although I was disappointed by the lettering coming off the side of the shaft and covering the camera lens. Something that would be hard to predict :P

If GPS failed before 100,000 ft (and it looks like any commercial GPS would), what about the altitude charts on the project's homepage?[0] How were they generated? Can that data-gathering method qualify it for the Carmack challenge?

0: http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html

I am not sure if anybody would know here but do we need to take permission from FAA for doing this kind of stuff?

Watch the video! It's one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile.

One of the most awesomest things I've seen in a while.

Pretty impressive, but that ain't space.

I read that as "dude sends epic homegrown into space." I pictured an enormous plant in a hydroponics research facility, with growth unfettered by gravity...

Looks like they were at the Black Rock Playa. Hope they take all their moop with them, since the Burning Man people just got done cleaning it up...