The Sputnik satellite was essentially a metal ball that bleeped, but it was succeeded by large and complex machines to map the Earth, haul in scientific data, relay "I Love Lucy," and ultimately enable the World Wide Web to live up to its name. Now that process has begun to reverse itself a bit as amateurs and experts alike strive to usher in a golden age of cheap, simple, and specialized satellites.

Looking far beyond the horizon, nanotechnology researchers aim to loose mite-sized probes into Earth orbit (and the cosmos beyond), gathered in what would appear to be dust clouds. Tiny machines operating on the molecular level would coordinate their specialized capabilities to fulfill challenging missions at a tiny fraction of the launch costs governments and corporations have to pay today.

Until then, you can look to your pocket for a vision of the future. In a trend that could quietly democratize space exploration more substantially than well-publicized space tourism jaunts, consumer electronics and the orbital hardware are merging again.

One of Stanford's greatest successes has been Sapphire, or the Stanford Audiophonic Photographic Infrared Experiment. While its infrared detector is a sophisticated piece of equipment developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Stanford University's mechanical engineering program, other items are straight off of a Christmas list. The onboard camera snapping dramatic photos of planet Earth is the Fotoman Plus black and white digital from Logitech. Students cracked the camera's flash out, figuring they probably wouldn't get much of a light bounce off of, say, all of western North America. The camera has its own JPEG compression and can store 32 pictures, but the team opted to use its CPU memory instead.

Sapphire is also equipped to give geography lessons from on high with a voice synthesizer (off the shelf from RC Systems) that's rigged to a transmitter. As it flies overhead, students with radios can tune in its monotone as it reads strings of text fed to it from ground control.

Another off-the-shelf satellite guru is Lt. Col. Billy Smith at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland. Instead of hitting administrators up for half a million dollars for an elaborate satellite program, his students, midshipmen, assembled a functioning satellite out of parts purchased from Radio Shack for under $50,000. The total price tag matches what's normally spent on an antenna system, which in this case was replaced by a metal measuring tape. And solar panels that can cost as much as a new car were shunned for those used to power telephones in remote locations.

If that sounds chintzy, you might be surprised at what the TV set-sized contraption achieved: the satellite was the first to report its location directly to the public using the Global Positioning System. That allows radio operators to bounce messages off of it, back down to Earth many miles away. The first word came into Maryland from Qatar, and since then users have included groups from such unlikely groups as sNew Zealand cross-country hikers.

"We hope to fly a satellite every other year from here on out. The plan is to take the experience and knowledge gained from finished projects and apply it to ever more ambitious and challenging projects. Two or three satellites down the road, we hope to be building satellites which are credible scientific or engineering efforts in their own right, rather than just student projects," Smith says. "I anticipate that we will find our niche in flying non-space rated components and establishing space-applications heritage for those which work."

Since satellite building hasn't advanced to the point of organized student competitions like there are for robotics, know-how spreads from institution to institution like wildfire, advancing all efforts at once. "There is obviously lots of technology becoming available that will make satellites more capable and cost effective. Qualifying technologies for these applications is a good way for students and amateurs to reduce costs of microsat subsystems," notes Arno Ledebuhr of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Two particularly important components of a satellite project, according to Ledbuhr, are processors and rechargeable batteries.

Not to mention screws. Smith's team carefully tests ordinary items to make sure they are spaceworthy. The experience can be more eye opening than any textbook. "I'll never forget the expression on one student's face after spending 45 minutes with our aerospace structures expert doing the analysis necessary just in deciding which screw to use to bolt on the outer plates," Smith recalls. "This project exposed our students to the myriad of hidden, mundane (but absolutely crucial) exacting and detailed activities that make up real engineering but seldom if ever make it into the classroom."

If all of this has a ham radio hobbyist feel to it, there's a reason. Ham operators have been at the forefront of satellite building for 40 years. In 1961, when Sputnik was still a hot topic, the hobbyists' OSCAR 1 (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) flew piggyback into space with an Air Force satellite. Just over a decade later, AMSAT-OSCAR 6 (an amateur satellite built by Americans, Australians, and Germans) was the first to show that Dopplar locators could be used to aid search and rescue efforts, and relay medical data from remote areas.

But some of the current amateur programs are eager to go further than those pioneers ever dreamed.

Stanford and its partner California Polytechnic State University are focussing on developing the CubeSat program. These four inch cubes could carry small payloads and perhaps fly in formation. Twigg expects the picosatellites to carry instruments to measure the magnetosphere and radiation levels, and to test basic hardware like expandable solar panels. "We expect in the near future to be flying biological experiments," Twiggs said.

Look for mission concepts to multiply exponentially. Several Universities across the world have already hopped on the CubeSat bandwagon, and private companies are offering services based on little boxes, even if sometimes for such mundane purposes as using them as urns to carry ashes to space for burial.

For the living, content to stay on Earth for a while longer, low Earth orbit (LEO) isn't the limit, either. "I believe it would be very feasible to start with CubeSat lunar flyby and return by the earth missions. I could see delivering a constellation of CubeSats to be put into LEO orbit around Mars for atmospheric measurements," remarks Twigg. "Why not find some missions that could send CubeSats into deep space but with earth flybys every few years? Imagine grade school children assisting building a CubeSat and getting measurements from it every few years as it comes back by the earth."

More ambitious still might be sending a student project to touch the dust of another world. "We would certainly like to do probes and landers. Some may fail, but in an educational program, failure of a mission is not a failure in learning. Failures in mission can enhance learning," Twiggs observes. "Even short missions in low earth LEO that reentered within 6 months - 2 years could be tremendous learning experiences for students."

Such wild adventures might draw upon many schools, each contributing a specialized bit of hardware or software, or mission control responsibilities. That would give many more students a sense of ownership over a mission than smaller, individual projects, Twiggs said.

For all of their potential achievements, learning is still the emphasis for most student satellite programs, and many amateur ones. This is especially true since many alumnae will be working for military, NASA and corporate programs in short order, and hitting the ground running.

Midshipmen in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Naval Academy are required to learn about spacecraft designs in their first year, Smith said. It's a good way to pull together mathematics, science, and engineering. But despite the ability, creativity, and enthusiasm students displayed, "for many years, the design experience was limited to paper studies," Smith recalled. The Academy's Small Satellite Program now gives midshipmen hands-on experience with building and testing space hardware, and networks them with other students and space professionals, and teaches them about the bureaucracies involved in a launch.

And there are intermediate steps useful for even high school students, Twiggs observed.

CricketSats consisting of 35mm film cans flown by party balloons and soda CanSats dropped with parachutes from airplanes can cost between $15 and $250 and still perform worthy experiments using processors and two-way communications.

Balloons and airplanes sound mighty friendly when one considers that launches into space can cost up to $10,000 per pound. In truth, it was the launch that made Sputnik such a news item - it meant that the Soviets had advanced missile capabilities. So far, the student projects have piggybacked on generous government programs, but both Twiggs and Smith are investigating the possibilities of one day conducting student launches.

In the meantime, Smith advises, make satellites as if your uncle were Flash Gordon. You'll still come out ahead.

"Just build it, even if you don't expect to ever see it fly," Smith adds. "Your students will benefit mightily from the experience, even if your satellite never leaves the campus."