Think you can design -- and make -- a rocket engine to launch nano-satellites into low Earth orbit? Then DIYRockets and its sponsor Sunglass have a competition for you.
The 3D Rocket Challenge is offering $10,000 in prizes for creating collaborative, open-source designs and business cases for affordable 3D-printed rocket engines that can launch nanosats weighing 0.5-10kg.
Shapeways.com, a 3D printing (aka additive manufacturing) community, will help create each of the top two designs, which will be judged by inventor Dean Kamen, TED Senior Fellow Angelo Vermeulen and experts from NASA, MIT and others. First prize for the best rocket engine is $5,000.
DIYRockets describes its goal as "building a democratized space industry ... [and] lowering the cost of space exploration as much as possible by generating extremely low cost knowledge and space technology through open sourcing and crowdsourcing." Sunglass is a cloud-based collaboration environment enabling global teams to design products.
