N-Prize Interview

The Space Show has an interview of Dr. Paul Dear, who made the N-Prize. This is a small (by orbital space standards) cash prize for an inexpensive system to launch and track a tiny orbiting satellite. You can add "extremely" in front of "small", "inexpensive", and "tiny" in the previous sentence. The sense of humor you see on the N-Prize site (eg: they say "impossibly small", "ludicriously small" and "pitifully small") also comes through in the interview.

On the N-Prize teams site, you can see a list of several teams that have already signed up. With the small prize, Dr. Dear is hoping for the type of innovative thinking that often comes from hobbyist and student teams having fun competing and going after an interesting objective. Anyway, that's all the money he could spare. During the interview, several team members, and potential future team members, called in.

Of the 5 teams on the teams page at the moment, here are the ones with web sites listed:

Nebula
South African Rocketry Association
Generation Space

Here's the N-Prize Google Discussion Group.

You can get N-Prize merchandise at Cafe Press, where they promise that

50% of all profits from this store will go towards beer. The remainder will be squandered. We felt you should know that.