Danish Manned Spacecraft Built by Volunteers

A rocket that can carry a human into space has been built piece by piece by a team of Danish volunteers and it should be launched on August 31.

Whoever said that putting a man in space requires huge government funding and it can only be done by a big space agency of a large resourceful country?

A team of Danish volunteers demonstrated that with lots of determination, skills, donations and sponsorships, anyone can build a rocket that could carry a man into space.

The project led by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen is called HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE, and its first flight test will have a crash-test dummy instead of a live pilot, for safety reasons obviously.

It will be launched from a floating platform also built by the team, towed into the middle of the Baltic Sea by Nautilus, a submarine that represented the team's last project.

The spacecraft will not move at orbital speeds, as its creators said, but it will still break the sound barrier and the pilot will undergo serious g-forces.

The pilot will stand inside the capsule and will only be able to move his arms and operate a camera, the exit hatch, the manual override function, an additional oxygen mask and a vomit bag, just in case.

The team's original target is 150,000 meters; when the rocket will reach it, it will begin its descent, parachutes will slow it down and its landing will be tracked with a GPS and a “fast boat”.

“We should be able to receive a descent plot which can be used in projecting a splashdown ellipse pretty accurately, if we factor in wind speeds and so on,” said the team, according to Wired Science.

The entire crew will set off from Denmark a day before the launch as they need to sail about 36 hours before getting to the launch site.

If this launch succeeds, it will be huge for Denmark, as it will become the fourth country to have sent one of its citizens into space, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China.

But most of all, it would have done that without any government funding!

Way to go, guys, good luck to you!