BitSat Design Study Announced

BitCoins took one small step towards space today as Jeff Garzik's Dunvegan Space Systems and Deep Space Industries Inc. announced a preliminary design contract to develop an orbital system for the not-for-profit BitSat project. A constellation of tiny BitSats will comprise an orbital node for the bitcoin network now on Earth, continuously broadcasting the latest bitcoin block from orbit, enhancing the resiliency of bitcoin in the event of disruptions or outages to the terrestrial bitcoin P2P mesh network.

"Private spaceflight is driving down costs so that great ideas like BitSats are within reach of even volunteer nonprofits," said Garzik, organizer of a donation-supported campaign to build and fly the system. "We want to keep bitcoin healthy and free by finding alternative ways to distribute block chain data."

Bitcoin transactions become official once a group is encoded – or "solved" by independent computing efforts -- into a block and added to the blockchain, a record of every bitcoin transfer ever made. BitSats will provide a cross-check verifying the blocks available on the terrestrial network haven't been spoofed, and also providing the latest blocks to locations off the terrestrial grid.

"Deep Space is about using space resources – including space itself," said Rick Tumlinson, DSI Chairman. "BitSat is actually very much in line with our spacecraft development plans, including another private system we will be announcing in a few months using many of the same components and systems. This means much lower costs - very important for the BitSat effort."

"I believe space is the future, and can also be useful right now," said Garzik. "I chose DSI for this project based on their proposal, the expertise they have internally and within their network and the fact that they are pushing the cutting edge – just as we are at Dunvegan."

DSI will develop detailed requirements for the space and ground segments of a BitSat constellation, and preliminary plans for the architecture, operations concept, and spacecraft design.  The results will be published by September for open community evaluation. Dunvegan Space Systems is collecting BitSat donations via the bitcoin address 1M9MyyPsAak7zRjW4D96pTxDaAEpDDZLR7.

"The goal is to design a system that is as open and inexpensive as possible," said Daniel Faber, Deep Space chief operating officer.

FMI: www.deepspaceindustries.com