Planetary Society Wants To Launch a Crowd-Funded Solar Sail

Posted by timothy on Friday May 15, 2015 @12:59PM from the unfurling dept.

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.

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Re:slush fund by Aliotroph · 2015-05-15 16:34 · Score: 3, Informative

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.