Solar Sail

solar_sail_launched_space.jpg width=118 height=120 align=right>PostGazette reports 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 proembling 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)