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Planetary Society Wants To Launch a Crowd-Funded Solar Sail
jan_jes writes to note that The Planetary Society is attempting to crowdfund its own version of the light-powered space-craft popularized by Carl Sagan as a "solar sailer." (YouTube video, with the Society's CEO Bill Nye.)
The current model is a CubeSat no bigger than a breadbox with four sails. If the team manages to raise enough money, LightSail will be sent to orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2016. LightSail will be released into an orbit with an altitude of 720 kilometers (450 miles), high enough to escape most of the planet's atmospheric drag.
Their crowdfunding goal has been far surpassed (more than $476,000 at this writing), but more can't hurt; maybe NASA could use some of the surplus.
is that in micro-refrigerators or slices-per-second?
Happy because people can get together and do something meaningful.
Sad because bureaucrats can't be convinced this is a meaningful endeavor.
NASA could have being a driving force in all this kind of apparently crazy experiments. But is struggling with the quantity of pork distributed by politicians from the meager budget to their home states.
Wasn't there a sci-fi paperback 25 years ago sold with the intent that the profits were supposed to go towards putting saran wrap in space?
http://www.amazon.ca/Project-S...
With a 1963 SF story in the Scouting magazine "Boy's Life", I believe that Arthur C. Clarke beat Carl Sagan to the "solar sail" idea by a decade or so.
Just sayin'
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Carl sagaN perhaps?
Does anybody else think that this could be a solution to global warming? If we can mass produce these and send them up using SpaceX re-usable rockets the cost should be relatively low. They could reflect as much or little sunlight as needed. They could even remove heat over hurricanes to mitigate damage. We could even reduce temperatures at the equator and increase temperatures in the northern/southern latitudes if desired. In the long run it would be a good way to heat up mars, cool off venus, and make the moon more habitable.
Hence "popularized" not "invented." It really wasn't one of Clarke's best-known shorts, and though I'm just guessing, I'd imagine that a visible celebrity like Sagan, on a then-popular show like Carsons, got more awareness for the idea.
I want to see an EM drive go into space.
I'm 95% sure it won't work... but can you imagine if it does.
Massive liability. You can't afford to have a few small asteroid piercing holes in that while flying in space.
The story was a good one and was anthologized in several collections. But Clarke was a real genius, where Sagan only talked a good game. If Clarke had patented all the innovative ideas that he wrote stories about - like geosynchronous communications satellites or ground-controlled approaches in bad weather - he'd have been richer than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined.
- like geosynchronous communications satellites
Fewer than a dozen communications satellites were launched before his patent would have expired, and some of those were Soviet, and only two of them were geosynchronous.
No clue? Their Kickstarter page currently has stretch goals listed covering up to $1 million. Their site (linked from the Kickstarter) explains they estimate needing $5.45 million for the entire project - which I assume includes the parts they've completed, including the test launch this month - and that they have raised $4.2 million of that so far. They seem to have a handle on what they want to do with the money. They aren't building a mysterious slush fund.
It's hard to guess at how much they will raise in the end, but complex projects often go over budget or suffer technical issues. Any extra money not accounted for by their stated goals will likely go towards those things.
I'm a little dubious of the value of spending $75,000 on a symposium (one of the uses of the extra money they mentioned in an update), seeing as how solar sailing is in its relative infancy. Why do we need to spend any effort to "promote" solar sails to other scientists -- shouldn't the results speak for themselves?
On the other hand, given that they're already committed to a schedule it's not like they can really use the extra money to make any major changes to the spacecraft, beyond the integration testing they mentioned. I just wonder if there were a way to use the money more directly on science/engineering (perhaps for the next future solar sail project), or if it's just a necessary part of the whole "spend time hunting for grant money" phase of academic development.
The Planetary Society has built* a number of spacecraft before. (*In fact they only really do research, funding, advocacy etc. The actual construction is contracted to established aerospace companies.) I wouldn't worry about this one at all. Full disclosure: I've been a member for a year or so.
Patenting "geosynchronous communications satellites"...well, to quote Clarke himself:"I learned from my patent attorney that even if I had tried to patent the communications satellite in 1945, the patent would have been rejected because the required technology did not yet exist, and the patent wouldn't have been worth getting because its life would only have been 17 years. The patent would have expired the year before the Early Bird was launched." So...unfortunately he wouldn't have. By publishing the idea and not patenting it, he put the idea into the public domain for the betterment of mankind. Of course, the patent system back then wasn't nearly as horrible as it is today...
the rest of it is going to fund the 2016 Tyson / Nye Presidential campaign....I wish...
Last time they tried this it ended up being the fuck up of the century.
The Planetary Sheep Society will of course try to launch this useless crap into space no matter what since it was the dream of their Messiah, Carl Sagan. How scientific, indeed...
I admire Clarke as much as anybody here, but he admits he did not invent the geostationary orbit (though he was the first to suggest using the orbit for communications satellites). The idea had been proposed as early as the 19th century by Tsiolkovsky. Citation available here (paywalled, sorry, but you can get the gist from the abstract).
The first test launch is actually just a few days away on May 20. You can watch it live at http://sail.planetary.org/miss....
Why do we need to spend any effort to "promote" solar sails to other scientists -- shouldn't the results speak for themselves?
There is a difference between trying to promote an idea, and promote discussion of an idea. The amount of times I've gotten feedback on research from presentations is vastly more than from papers and other ideas people could have easily accessed from home, plus often you can have much more informal discussion of things that have yet to be published.
I'm a little dubious of the value of spending $75,000 on a symposium (one of the uses of the extra money they mentioned in an update), seeing as how solar sailing is in its relative infancy. Why do we need to spend any effort to "promote" solar sails to other scientists -- shouldn't the results speak for themselves?
(a) Well, that's what, 2% of the overall funding?
(b) It's a great place to present the results
(c) It's a reasonable cost for this sort of thing
(d) You're kind of saying "why don't we save money and get rid of all history departments in the world... you guys all did your jobs and put everything in books, right?"
Predating Clarke's story, Planet of the Apes, also from 1963, featured a solar sailing interstellar ship.
I don't think Mike Tyson would make a very good president.
The girl who sailed The Soul was written in 1960, and had interstellar travel via infrared sails thousands of miles long.
That's Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
After the test flights, we need to use these solar sailing spacecraft for actual exploration of the solar system. Solar Sailing should be in use for probes by now. It's been too long... It could be a much cheaper alternative to chemical propulsion, and it and ion drives are the future. Maybe these propulsion techniques could eventually be used for manned spaceflight. But what we are really waiting for is nuclear propulsion. If we sent a large spacecraft, constructed in orbit, and powered with Project Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion, or project Daedalus-style nuclear propulsion, we could be to Alpha Centauri in the same period of time it took for Voyager to leave the Solar System. But the folks in Washington don't want to divert money from short term, human goals to make this possible. Not to mention the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It needs to be revised so we can do it legally.