alt Hacker NewsI wonder how crazy the scale here can get. How far can I go? The bps.space guy is heading into space. Can the community hit the moon? Literally.
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Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...
Might be worth checking out the "Copenhagen Suborbitals" group (they have a YouTube channel) and see if they're still active! It's been years but I think I recall they were trying to build something capable of getting a person into space (not sure if orbit was a goal).
"Space" is 100km. The moon at its closest is about 350,000km.
So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.
Amateur rocketry achieving orbit would be significant. Reaching the moon would be substantially more difficult.
Amateurs have reached the karman line, orbit is still pretty much out of reach. The people who get close to the karman line use two stage passive stabilized airframes and solid fuel motors. The airframes are basically works of art and it takes a lot of luck because of passive stabilization and Mach 3+ speeds. Many pictures of these rockets have their paint and leading fin edges burned off when they're recovered. Propellent is expensive and an attempt at > 100k feet is about $5-6k an attempt in propellent alone.
This guy is widely respected in the hobby and this flight made it to 293k feet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmv7G6Rf5WE
Check out the liquid bi-prop engines the halfcat guys have, apparently they were just certified by the HPR hobby governing organization Tripoli which means they can be insured at sponsored launches. With a liquid fueled engine you can do thrust vectoring (nozzle gymbaling) easier than solid fuel motors so active stabilization is more feasible. If you have active stabilization then all you need is thrust to weight > 1, enough fuel, and you'll eventually get to whatever altitude you want. Orbit means orbital velocity and that's just a whole other ball game.
https://www.halfcatrocketry.com/