A photograph of the upper atmosphere taken from the Spacebridge Alpha. (Blake Barrett/Spacebridge)

It's late November, and three men are huddled in the early morning chill of the Californian desert, northeast of San Francisco. They've just launched a weather balloon high into the atmosphere, 24 kilometres above the surface of the Earth. But that's not the strange part.

What's unusual is the payload floating underneath.

This is the fourth launch for the members of SpaceBridge, a small, San-Francisco-based collective of programmers and hardware enthusiasts. They aren't affiliated with NASA, or considered scientists by any means — just civilians with an interest in space.

They build space balloon probes rigged with cellphones and cameras, just because they can. And like all good stories, the project started with a bet.

"The very first launch, I wanted to do everything with off-the-shelf parts. You would go into Best Buy with a Visa card and have a space program," said Blake Barrett, one of SpaceBridge's founding members and a software engineer in the Bay Area, about the vision that got things started.

But friend and fellow team member Brian Choate didn't think it could be done. Space balloons — high-flying crafts to the atmosphere's upper layers — were once NASA's specialty, after all. The idea of sending a couple of cameras and a cheap mobile phone to the edges of space seemed impossible.

Barrett, however, would prove Choate wrong.

Do-it-yourself space program

Today, SpaceBridge is the antithesis of your traditional space program — inventive, do-it-yourself, and most importantly, cheap.

Spacebridge builds space balloon probes rigged with cellphones and cameras. (Blake Barrett/Spacebridge)

Compared to what NASA is capable of launching, these craft may not be as powerful, or travel quite as far. But it's where the future of exploration lies — something we can all have a part in, our own personal probes.

Perhaps the most impressive example comes from a group of students at MIT. Dubbed Project Icarus, the three-member team built a space balloon of their own that captured video and photographs from within the Earth's stratosphere — and it only cost them $150.

"It's been done before, for a decade at least. But we wanted to do it low-budget," explains Justin Lee, who worked on the project last year with then-classmates Oliver Yeh and Eric Newton.

Some materials were repurposed from previous projects, while others — like the cameras and GPS — were bought from eBay used.

Space on a shoestring

Groups like these underline how the space race has changed. While sending such technology into space would have once cost millions of dollars, today that's hardly the case. It's now within the reach of privately funded groups.

At NASA's Ames Research Center, outside of Mountain View, Calif., Matthew Reyes has been contracted to evaluate the future of space technology. His company, Exploration Solutions Inc., has a number of leads — but none more promising than an Android phone.

Smartphones, Reyes explains, are more than just phones these days. They're rugged, scientific instruments, complete with built-in GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes and video recorders. They're more powerful than satellites were even 20 years ago, yet small enough to fit in our pockets — or, in his case, a rocket or balloon.

"This isn't because I'm a smart guy figuring out some weird use for the phone," explains Reyes. "This is an inherent, natural capability of the device."

Reyes worked with fellow Ames subcontractor Chris Boshuizen to send two Android phones into near-space this past summer, testing their suitability as cheap, science-friendly probes. The devices captured video and sensor data throughout the trip, and cost just a few hundred dollars — pocket change compared to your typical multimillion-dollar NASA probe.

It's a mentality even Google has embraced, having sent seven of their new Nexus S smartphones into the sky this month via balloon-rigged beer coolers.

A snapshot taken from the first launch of the Spacebridge project. (Blake Barrett/Spacebridge) And the do-it-yourself space movement is catching the imagination of all ages. Back at SpaceBridge, member Christopher Lincoln was surprised to hear that high school students in Hawaii had been building a craft of their own, based on the team's design. In fact, kids, parents and even university professors are turning cheap space-balloons into a simplistic backyard projects — and to Lincoln, that's the best part.

"Science is not something you believe because a dusty old book told you, but something you actively and consciously question and test," he explains — in this case, by sending a couple of cameras and balloons up into space.

That's not to say there aren't caveats. Lincoln notes that the long-term effects of cosmic radiation — increasingly potent at such high altitudes — is beginning to affect the image quality of the phones' on-board cameras. Meanwhile, unpredictable weather patterns mean it's possible the payload can land more than 100 kilometres away from where it was expected to come down.

And of course, the space-balloon moniker can be slightly misleading. The weather balloons Lincoln uses aren't capable of escaping the planet's atmosphere, popping well before the barrier to true space can be reached. But the craft produced by SpaceBridge are nonetheless impressive, and judging by the pictures they're delivering, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference at altitudes that high.

"No one is doing anything cooler than NASA did in the early fifties," admits Lincoln. "But we can do what NASA did in the early fifties for $150."