1000 Table Tennis Balls Launched Into Space

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Virgin Galactic’s space flights promise travelers an out of this world journey. But they have to pay the price (around $200,000). JP Aerospace, a volunteer-run space program, is on a mission to carry student projects to the edge of space for free. The only requirement: the project must fit inside a ping-pong ball capsule.

JP Aerospace has launched 6,440 of these “PongSats,” short for “Ping-Pong Satellites,” into space. Founder John Powell said of their Kickstarter project, “with PongSats, we’re essentially taking 1,000 astronauts to space with us.” Each voyage begins in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and the central goal behind PongSats is to make space travel accessible to students of all ages.

They successfully reached their Kickstarter goal of $9,000 on August 16th (the day after Uberpong reached its Kickstarter funding goal!).