I think a better way to spur investment would be offering a reward tier that gives a portion of the company (i.e., a $x investment gets you a y% stake in the company). This is just selling stock in a company off of Wall Street and probably a better fit for a company that isn't offering services or a physical product to the general public. I'm not sure what kind of regulations you have to follow (or if kickstarter would even allow it) but it would certainly open up the field of potential backers to include the folks that know/care nothing about rockets but would like to make some money when the company is inevitably bought out by a larger space launch company like SpaceX.
http://spase.stanford.edu/Hybrid_Rocket_Student_Meeting.html
http://web.mit.edu/rocketteam/www/lab.html
http://www.umich.edu/~mrocket/archive/hybrid_i_photos.html
Last link shows some people I know personally, now at SpaceX.
(1) There are a few of us. It feels good to be associated with something breaking ground in this field.
(2) This could be a demo, a proof-of-concept. Those are useful in later attracting investment, or at least attention which can be later translated into capital.
RE (2): Valid point. Successful Kickstarter campaigns often raise more funding afterwards. But I still think they would like to say, "look at all these people who were willing to risk money by investing in our company" rather than saying, "look at all these people who threw us a bone when we asked for it." Both statements demonstrate an amount of attention, but I think the first is better information to future investors than the second.
What about sending any tiny object (with weight and size restrictions) into space and recovering it?
The higher levels could offer to send a small custom payload into space (if not orbit) e.g. a smartphone with sensors.
The first two would be more for the novelty (this ring was in space!), where the last might be for a university project or something.
(Not sre what kickstarter's ToS have to say about this though)
The last thing we need is more high-velocity objects being randomly inserted into orbit by hobbyists, when there's no reliable means to clean up the objects left in orbit by predecessors.
http://images.gizmag.com/inline/space-debris-kessler-syndrom...
How about a startup/kickstarter that harvests existing space junk, instead of one that encourages people to haphazardly produce more?
I would love to see more details about how the engines are 3d printed, and the plans for the designs. Will these engine designs be open sourced?
Also, the rewards are a little difficult to parse. A list format would probably be easier to read, rather than one sentence with each reward concatenated to the rest with 'and'. I think having the 'all previous rewards plus ...' is a better format as well, but that is more personal preference.
[EDIT]
Further, there is no break down of how the money will be used. It seems like 'give us money and we'll do cool things with it' but without any clarification of how much money is really needed to do those cool things.
[EDIT2]
There is a pretty amazing blog over at Rocket Moonlighting [0] that contains a lot of details around 3d printed rocket engines. Well worth a look.
I'm a little surprised to see that they are going with pumped LOX instead of pressure-fed. With engines that small I would have expected the extra hardware to be a poor tradeoff.
The aerospike engine has a truncated physical spike that is extended by an "aerospike" that is formed by the pressurized turbine exhaust.
It's still crude and early, but it's very nice that people are actually building rocket stuff! Too bad ITAR is a problem...
"A secondary flow (turbine drive gases) is exhausthed throug the nozzle base and adds to the recirculating flow to increase the base pressure and the overall nozzle efficiency."
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998017...
Had to curl it, since pdf.js always froze before loading it. For some reason the column layout is broken so quoting the text required quite a lot of hand editing.
Spike nozzle is particularly problematic around the throat, which has bigger area than for a regular bell-shaped nozzle.
