What an amazing journey this aircraft has had.
The F-104, designed just after the first jet-vs-jet air combat in The Korean War, was created to fly as fast as possible, hurtling past all the previous speed records. Less than a decade after test pilot Chuck Yeager first broke the speed of sound, it became the first jet to fly more than twice the speed of sound.
On top of a military career which lasted nearly 50 years, the F-104 found itself serving as an experimental testbed – a rocket-powered spacecraft stand-in that allowed pilots to practice the kind of rocket-thrust manoeuvring astronauts would use to control a spacecraft.
Now, some 60 years after the prototype first flew, the F-104 has found another role – as the launch vehicle for a new generation of tiny satellites.
[…]
Cubecab plans to launch very small satellites – known as cubesats – using a rocket that weighs a similar amount. It’s much smaller, and therefore cheaper, than any other launch method currently available.
How will CubeCab launch these tiny satellites? Simple – they’ll use Starfighters.
Cubecab will strap its lightweight rockets, each carrying a satellite weighing around 10kg, on to the kind of underwing ‘pylons’ usually used to fire missiles. And Starfighters Inc, a Florida-based company which still flies a handful of F-104s, will take their pint-sized payloads up to the edge of the stratosphere and fire them into orbit.
Now thats cool but at the same time, a little scary. Google already knows what I had for breakfast (and probably the NSA, too). I know currently there is a list of interesting missions looking outward and the prospect of improved weather forecasting sounds great.
What troubles me is that Google already has exabytes of data on people and government surveillance has veered of the reservation many times. Given the lure of swarms of little cubesats watching, even if only innocently collecting more data on each of us, could easily be misused.