Erik, Tom and I took some photos for the RocketMavericks’ Clotho Project today… scaling a hobby to civilian space exploration.
Each of the four blue tubes is an 8-foot tall Q motor, just like the one I got for Xmas (photo). Each of them has about 4x the thrust of a cruise missile booster.
The rocket should roar past Mach 4 on a suborbital flight into space.
Then it gets interesting. Here’s an introduction to the astrobiology payload from the Clotho rocketpedia page:
“For millennia we have explored the biodiversity of life on earth, from the bottom of the oceans to the tropical rainforests. But what happens when we leave the surface of the earth? Darwin noted algae in dust, Pasteur started the quest, and The Clotho Project will turn it into a research program sampling higher than ever before and using cutting edge aerospace technology and biological techniques to answer one of the fundamental questions in biology today:
How far off the earth’s surface does life exist, and what lives there?”
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