Mission on the Cheap Will Launch Spaceship That Uses Solar Sails
by Sharon Begley
June 17, 2005; Page B1
When you have $4 million for a space mission that would cost NASA more like $60 million, accommodations must be made.
For starters, you don't look twice at Western space engineers, but hire some of the underemployed, bargain-basement Russians, who designed spacecraft that reached Venus and Mars and Halley's comet. Not only are these guys mechanical geniuses (the Russians, after all, kept the Mir space station aloft long past its planned lifetime using little more than cigarette paper and spit), but they work for 1/10th the going rate for U.S. engineers, says longtime Russia hand Jim Cantrell, president of the space consulting firm Strategic Space Development, Hyde Park, Utah. They are also veterans of a Soviet space and military culture where "if something didn't work you were shot," he says with only slight hyperbole.
You also use castoffs. For your rocket, you try an old ICBM that Russia needed to ditch anyway under an arms-reduction treaty. ("We got a helluva deal," says Mr. Cantrell.) And when your Russian engineers haul out the nuclear warhead from the sub and replace it with your spaceship but fail to make the bolts strong enough, with the result that the ship doesn't pop out during a 2001 test flight, you remain calm. You also think of the millions you saved by not testing everything umpteen times and by forgoing NASA-esque budget-busting backup systems.
And then you cross your fingers.
If all goes as planned, that ICBM will blast out of a Russian nuclear sub deep in the Barents Sea on Tuesday with a payload out of science fiction: a solar sail called Cosmos 1. A solar sail is the only kind of spaceship that interprets "ship" as they did in the 16th century. The unmanned craft will glide through space on gossamer wings propelled only by the pressure of photons, or particles of sunlight. The technology offers the possibility of a cheaper and faster route to the heavens, and the private financing -- from Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, N.Y., which produces science films and DVDs -- has renewed hopes that government agencies won't be the only ticket to the stars. Although NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia and Japan have developed solar sails, none has flown them.
Cosmos 1 will "blaze a new path into the solar system, opening the way to eventual journeys to the stars," says Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, the private group that spearheaded the project.
Six minutes after launch, the last stage of the three-stage rocket will fall away. Soon after, a motor will begin a 70-second burn to kick the spaceship into a near-polar orbit 1,300 miles up. After 37 minutes in orbit, two solar panels (not to be confused with the solar sails: the panels produce electricity to turn the sails) will deploy and turn toward the sun like morning glories.
After four days, controllers will try to pop the ship's eight 49-foot-long, triangular sails from their folded package into a 6,500-square-foot configuration resembling a windmill. If it works, Cosmos 1 will be bright enough to see with the naked eye. (You can track it at http://planetary.org/solarsail/watch.)
This will be white-knuckle time. "Will the sail material twist and wrap around itself? Will it get stuck?" Dr. Friedman asks. The Russians tested several ways of unfolding the sails. In some tests, there was too little force expelling the sails, so they got stuck; in others there was too much, so they tore. The folding method they settled on has never been tested in space.
If the sails unfurl, Cosmos 1 will ride on sunbeams. Sunshine may not feel like much, but calculations show that in the void of space it can accelerate Cosmos 1 to 195 miles an hour after one day, and to 10,000 mph after 100. The ship is unlikely to last that long, though. Built as a proof of principle, its 0.005-millimeter-thick sails will degrade, and it should fall back to Earth as a fireball after a month.
Free of expensive, heavy and inefficient rocket fuel, solar sails offer the best hope for long-distance space missions, supporters say. As maneuverable as the sails on water-borne ships, solar sails can tack, which in theory means they could make ports of call at any planet.
"Turning the reflective side of the sails toward the sun when the sun is behind it, but the less-reflective side when the sun is ahead of it, lets you control the solar sail as you do a sailboat," says Dr. Friedman, who researched solar sails at NASA in the 1970s. "If we succeed, we hope space agencies will look at this as the transportation technology that can pave the way for interplanetary missions."
A solar sail -- perhaps given an extra push with laser light from a station orbiting Earth or on the moon -- could reach Pluto in two to three years. And it is the only feasible route to the stars; standard rockets can't carry enough fuel for interstellar travel.
A launch on the summer solstice has a poignancy the Cosmos 1 team couldn't resist. "I can just imagine those first rays of the sun striking the ancient observatories of Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon," says Ann Druyan, the head of Cosmos Studios and widow of Carl Sagan. "Cosmos 1 will rise from the sea into space to take its place in the great story of exploration."