We were all behind the times

 

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/microsat-04w.html

Plenty of commercial sattelites go up, i think a lot of funding for NASA comes from putting up communications sattelites, so talk to them about it, but i seem to remember launch costs were measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars per kilo. Start a fund?

i live in new zealand, there is a couple of guys around my area that have built their own satellite. It is basically a square box with solar panels and some antennas. Its supposed to relay radio signals to other parts of the world. They are paying a russian company $100,000 to get it up in the sky with a whole lot of other homemade satellites. as far as the materials for building the satellite, it would be quite expensive, it must be able to survive the conditions in space ( vacuum, other radiation and stuff). I read this in a newspaper article, they are launching it next year sometime.

0-20mi feet- baloon

20mi-100mi- rocket

Height is not the only thing needed to get a satalite into orbit. You also need velocity. If you are not orbiting fast enough then the stalite will just fall back down (it won't be an orbit). From what I understand, this is a big cost of the orbital craft compared to suborbital craft.

yeah not only do you need to get up to ~160km so atmospheric drag isn't a big problem, you need to build up about 7.3km/s horizontal velocity(hence the massiveness of the rockets and their fuel tanks.) if you launch to the east then you've already got about 400m/s from the rotation of the earth.(depends where you are though)

Here NASA's solid rocket fuel:

 

Aluminum powder...................................16

Ammonium perchlorate..............................69.9

Fe2O3 catalyst....................................0.07

Rubber based binder of polybutadiëne acrylic acidacrylonitrile.....12.04

Epoxy curing agent................................1.96

 

 

 

You can get it off the NASA website.

Amateur rocketry projects can and do happen. If you were capable of launching an object at any sort of reasonable cost, and with any sort of accuracy, I'd surmise that you could affiliate yourself with a proper space program. In the UK, for example, there have been proper attempts at launching things into space (starchaser UK, for example) which have significant difficulties.

 

You'd still be looking at enormous costs, but a private company or individual should definitely be capable of an attempt.