What would you send into space if you had the chance?

A new crowdfunded project attempts to make space access affordable and achievable. (ArduSat Project/Kickstarter.com) Do you have a message or project that's out of this world?

A team of American scientists wants to send it into space for the relatively low price of $325.00 US.

The crowd-funded ArduSat spacecraft, currently attracting money on Kickstarter, is designed to let anybody on earth conduct his or her own intergalactic experiment for one week.

ArduSat's team is led by NASA consultant and physicist Peter Platzer. They say it will be the first open-source satellite of its kind, allowing the general public to run their own space-based games, applications, experiments and even steer the onboard cameras to take pictures.

"We want to get you into space," reads the project's description on Kickstarter. "You're helping us develop a platform to make space access affordable and achievable for anyone."

The miniature cubic satellite weighs only one kilogram, but will have more than 25 sensors onboard, including a Geiger counter, spectrometer, magnetometer and plenty of cameras.



"The sensors are connected to a bank of user-programmable Arduino processors, which run your application or experiment, gathering data from the space environment," the developers write.

For a pledge of $300 US or more, earthlings can also have their personalized messages broadcast from the satellite for an entire day, ensuring the message hits every point on Earth.

This illustration from ArduSat's Kickstarter page shows how the cube is constructed. (ArduSat Project/Kickstarter.com)

Platzer's team hopes to send ArduSat into space within the next few months.

If given permission from the government, ArduSat will hitch a ride into space on an International Space Station supply mission, Mashable reports.

The cube will stay in orbit for up to two years, at which point it will lose altitude and burn in the Earth's atmosphere.

If you could send anything into space, what would it be? Let us know in the comments below.