This Kickstarter will get 1000 Ping Pong Ball Projects into Space. Many of them will be student projects but there will be a bunch from non students so if you have a great idea you might be able to get it into space. There are some cool sponsorship levels such as getting a note into space and back for $10. I was wondering how many they recover since they say that they can be spread out up to 200 miles from the launch site. A tiny ping pong ball that is can be painted by the participant might be quite difficult to find, hopefully none of the kids choose an army camo theme for their ball. After further reading it seems that the balls will ride down in groups that are placed in a rack that can be tracked.
“We will launch the PongSats from the Black Rock desert in Nevada. The vehicles that carry them are called High Rack. They are made of foam and carbon fiber. We have four separate telemetry links to the High Rack tracking it during the flight. At the end of the flight we release the balloon and the High Rack descends by parachute.”
