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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?
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.
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.
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...
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).