The sentiment is powerful: space is no longer an exclusive club

Space travel has always seemed unobtainable, reserved for humankind’s elite. It’s technologically complicated, fraught with complex international legal restrictions, incredibly dangerous, and so damn expensive that your typical enthusiast must be content with telescopes, science fiction, and the Mars Curiosity Rover’s Twitter feed.

But as it turns out, space is no longer reserved for governments and billionaires. There are more projects like Copenhagen Suborbitals, amateur missions financed by space fans who want to be a part of something that feels big. We’re entering a second Space Age, in which innovation is led by the private sector, and crowdfunding is part of this new ecosystem. The Elon Musks and Richard Bransons of the world will take care of the multi-million dollar launches and $200,000-ticket space tours. Crowdfunding seeds projects at the other end of the spectrum, where tinkerers and star-gazers meet, and space may not be as far away as it looks.

In Virginia, three scientists and an entrepreneur raised $72,871 to build a prototype electric-pulsed plasma jet thruster. In Arizona, an aerospace company raised $20,843 to build a rocket motor for its suborbital spacecraft. In New York, a costume designer and a Russian aerospace engineer raised $27,632 to build an intra-vehicular space suit. In the Bay Area alone, there are at least three crowdfunded groups launching small satellites. The amounts are small, with the average donation falling between $24 and $157, depending on the project. But the sentiment is powerful: space is no longer an exclusive club.

When software developer Tim DeBenedictis watched the Space Shuttle Atlantis’s final landing at the Kennedy Space Center in July 2011, he realized he was seeing the end of an era. American space exploration seemed on the wane. In addition to decommissioning the shuttle, the Obama administration had ended NASA’s Constellation Program, which planned to send humans to the Moon, an asteroid, and Mars. No one in government seemed interested in even talking about space anymore. During the election, both candidates were decidedly lukewarm on space, making vague generalizations and talking about missions in 2025 or 2030 — a far cry from President John F. Kennedy’s speech on September 12, 1962: "We chose to go to the Moon. We chose to go to the Moon in this decade."

DeBenedictis's astronomy iPhone app SkySafari had sold "like gangbusters," and he was trying to decide what to do next. As the shuttle touched down, he turned to a friend and said, "Maybe we should think about doing our own satellite." A year later, he had raised $116,890 on Kickstarter to do just that.

Supporting a serious space project through crowdfunding is something that only became possible very recently. Mass-produced parts, particularly electronics developed for the cell phone industry, have gotten good enough to use in do-it-yourself space flight.

Kickstarter isn’t going to put a human on the Moon any time soon, but the fact that anyone can now buy into a space mission is pretty amazing. Even Laura Burns, an active NASA contractor who works on telescopes and flight simulation, gets a rush from backing space projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. She’s contributed to ten so far. "When you find something and think, ‘I can support this and I can help make this happen,’ it’s just all the more exciting," she said. "We're investing in the excitement, in the future."