NASA Wants Every State to Send a Satellite to Space

Let's be honest with ourselves: we all want to shoot something into space. Whether it's a genuine scientific experiment or a box of junk from the basement, the age of citizen spaceflight has awakened a deep desire to launch our own little pet projects into orbit.

NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative has made that goal more attainable than ever, and the agency just announced that it was accepting its sixth round of proposal submissions.

So if you have been dying to secure a launch your very CubeSat project, now is your chance to secure a place on a rocket headed for low Earth orbit  sometime between 2015 and 2018.

The ideal CubeSat volume is four inches cubed, which equals one "Cube" or 1U; most CubeSats of this size weigh around three pounds. However, volumes of 2U, 3U, and 6U will also be accepted.

The initiative is only open to nonprofits and educational organizations, and the deadline to enter is November 24 at 4:30 PM ET. NASA will announce which projects made the cut on February 6, 2015.

If you happen to be from one of the 21 states that hasn't yet launched a CubeSat, then you have particularly good odds, because the initiative is dead set on having every district, territory, and state send at least one CubeSat into orbit. Like Pokemon, NASA has to have them all. The agency aims to check that achievement off the to-do list within the next five years.

So far, 114 satellite projects from 29 states have been accepted by the initiative, and 17 of those CubeSats have already launched.

Among the coolest of those 17 projects include FIREBIRD (Focused Investigations of Relativistic Electron Burst Intensity, Range, and Dynamics) from the University of New Hampshire, which was launched in December 2013.

The satellite investigates magnetospheric microbursts, which have been detected by many orbiting satellites but remain very poorly understood.

FIREBIRD shared its rocket ride with three other pretty awesome CubeSats too, including the University of Michigan's M-Cubed-2 color camera, which should be snapping mid-res shots of the Earth as you read this. (Maybe it just finished taking a picture of YOU. Hope you're having a good hair day.)

A launch of five CubeSats this past February also included some choice orbital gems, including the popular Kickstarter-funded satellite KickSat, another color camera aboard the University of Colorado's ALL-STAR, and a CubeSat containing fern spores called SporeSat.

Several other CubeSat launches are scheduled for the coming months, after which the winning entries from this batch will begin their journey to orbit. Now's your chance to get in on the action, so get that proposal ready before November 24 and blast your very own spacecraft off this dumb planet.