- What if you could print your own? (Image: Associated Press)
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Now a new competition launched at the South by Southwest techfest in Austin, Texas, last Friday aims to democratise rocket-building with an attempt to get anyone in the world (well, anyone with a broadband connection and 3D design software) to join a crowdsourced effort to design an open-source, 3D-printable rocket engine.
Of course, any rocket engine that's 3D printable is going to be small - the strength of additive layer manufacturing is not up to scratch yet. The idea is to get people to contribute via the website of cloud host Sunglass to a design that will deliver "small payloads into low Earth orbit". That's cubesats of between 0.5 and 10 kilograms.
An outfit called DIYrockets in Mountain View, California, is leading the competition and claims to have NASA and Segway inventor Dean Kamen involved in judging the project, too. The prize is $10,000 cash and $500 in 3D printing - from Shapeways of Queens, New York - to realise the rocket.
But there's an added complication: this is a US-led project and the US Department of State views rockets as munitions. Information on them, let alone the rockets themselves, is governed by the International Trafficking in Arms regulations (ITAR), which let the US government veto exports of space-flight data and material. So how can an equal, global two-way street of ideas exist in this competition?
"Regarding ITAR, anyone who enters the competition agrees to follow their local [national] regulations, and the beauty of the Sunglass software is that you can also control levels of access," says DIYrockets cofounder Darlene Damm. "US entrants especially may need to be careful about access controls. Certain countries can also not enter the competition because of US regulations and those are in our terms of agreement."
My bet? That this will quietly become a US-only competition when it all becomes all too difficult to handle access levels.