It’s interesting that CSXT mostly coordinated online; one of the most ambitious modern amateur rocketry groups, Denmark’s Copenhagen Suborbitals, is similarly as much a digital effort as a physical one. Founded in 2008 by artist and inventor Peter Madsen (also designer of the world’s largest amateur submarine, Nautilus) and space architect Kristian von Bengtson, CS’s plan is simple but audacious: It wants to be the first amateur group to send a manned rocket above the the Kármán line.

To that end, the group used to call itself an “open source” space program, although “we’ve renamed it now to be an ‘open project,’” said Mads Wilson, CS’s communications officer. It turns out, understandably, that there are certain international regulations when it comes to ballistic technology, although Wilson also pointed out that much of what they do is based on publicly available, declassified NASA documents from the 1950s and 1960s.

He explained: “Everyone could do what we are doing, because we’re not really inventing anything new. The technology that we are using, most of it is inspired by what NASA did — we use these old rockets and how they were built as inspiration. There’s a Bible in rocketry called Rocket Propulsion Elements, it’s freely available on the web, there’s nothing we do that you cannot find in this book. The theory is available for anyone, but there’s a huge difference between how you do something in theory and how you actually do it. Rocketry is so much more than the actual rocket.”

Michaelson would agree with him there. Both CS and CSXT have found that designing, building, and testing a rocket is the lesser problem when compared to the things that go with it. For CSXT, red tape was a nightmare; much of the story of the launches of 1995 to 2004, as Michaelson tells it, is one of dealing with petty bureaucracy.

“Now I’ve opened the doors for others to follow,” he said. “The FAA and the Office of Space Transportation [OST]—you can go online, they’ve got fairly simple forms to fill in. They’ve dropped all that red tape. We had mountains of red tape. It’s a federal offense to put a rocket into space in this country. There’s a quarter of a million dollar fine and five years in the slammer. Even after we did everything, the bonding, the insurance, all the environmental assessments, I call on Friday and say, ‘Where’s my license?’ [The OST official] says, ‘I don’t know.’ I say, ‘We’re leaving here Sunday, we’re flying Thursday, I got film crews coming out to document this stuff!’ He just says, ‘I don’t know.’

“When I left my door, I was going to push that button and do five years in the slammer. I had two kids here and a wife here, but I was going to do it. That Wednesday — and we had the rocket in the tower, ready to go — a guy came up and said, ‘Hey, your license is back in town.’ So it was right up to the last minute. And, unfortunately, that one blew up.”

For CS, which operates in Denmark, there are still challenges, but it’s found some clever ways to solve them — like launching its rockets from a platform (called, whimsically, “Sputnik”) floating in international waters. “Once we get to a point where we work above 100 kilometers then it gets a little bit more more difficult,” said Wilson. “There’s a lot of political things, but we don’t have to ask permission as such. We mostly just have to coordinate.”

On July 23, CS launched its latest rocket, the 18.4-foot [5.6-meter] Nexø I. It launched successfully from Sputnik, reaching .93 miles [1.5 kilometers] before falling back down. That was kind of a failure — CS’s flight engineers had hoped to reach higher than 3.7 miles [6 kilometers] — but, in the spirit of openness, there’s a thorough breakdown of the flight data on the organization’s blog.

Nexø I is the first CS rocket to have an active guidance system and liquid fuel, necessary steps before planning begins on the rocket that will take a human into space. That rocket (they’re planning to call it “Spica”) is coming at an indeterminate point in the future, and the astronaut onboard, strapped in, will essentially be payload. “You cannot control a rocket, you simply can’t,” said Wilson.

Image credit: Copenhagen Suborbitals

Once it reaches its apogee, it will fall, swiftly, to the Baltic Sea, where a boat or helicopter will — it is hoped — recover it before it has a chance to sink. The whole process, from launch to splash landing, will take about 15 minutes.

This is all the more impressive considering that CS started, essentially, “as an art project,” Wilson said. Both Madsen and von Bengtson left CS in 2014; Madsen was bored with the repetitive work involved — “he was always more of an artist than an engineer,” explained Wilson — while von Bengtson left to (briefly) work for Mars One, and on other projects like an unsuccessful Kickstarter to fund an amateur rocket launch to the Moon. The current core team consists of around 55 members, all volunteers, who work together in CS’s Copenhagen workshop. It has a paltry budget for a space program, less then $150,000 per year, donated by a group of several hundred supporters. If Spica is built, it will be, by some distance, the largest amateur rocket ever constructed, weighing nearly 8,820 pounds [four tonnes] and standing 42.7 feet [13 meters] tall. That’s only slightly smaller than a V2.

Still, I had to ask — why? Because, to me, it looks like old-fashioned romanticism.

“I think the romanticism is still there,” Wilson said. “I mean, we are all children of the seventies and eighties. We grew up with the legacy of Apollo, and we grew up watching the Space Shuttle on television. Space is … it sounds a little corny, from Star Trek — space is the final frontier. We all dreamt about being astronauts — building big rockets is an acceptable compromise.

“From my point of view, over the years, many of the national-controlled space agencies like NASA and ESA, they have become, over time, paper tigers. For political reasons they can only take so much risk. But still, in the sixties or seventies you could not do this if you didn’t have government backup, because the technology you had to use was so insanely expensive. They invented the technology, and a lot of the technology that we use today is because of the work that they have done. We could not do what we do if they had not done it.”