Courtesyof
the Planetary Society
Courtesyof
the Planetary Society
By Eric Storm
What promises to be a boon in the human capability to gain more scientific knowledge about our planet and make the colonization of Mars a practical financial venture as well as carry human sensory to the nearest solar systems will be tested for the first time in a planned low orbit launch by the Russian Babakin Space Center and contracted by the Planetary Society.
A tentative Launch is scheduled for some time in June and will rocket the solar sail in sub space for a preliminary test followed by the real launch sometime between October and December with the goal being for the sun's photons to give the solar sail lift to raise its altitude. Telemitry data will be received in Russia and the United States. Russia, who is building the sail and providing the ballistic missile will launch from a submarine in the Barents Sea.
Where is the money and the initiative coming from? Cosmos Studios, headed by the late Carl Sagans wife, Ann Druyan is funding the Planetary Society, which in turn is contracting the fabrication and launch to the Babakin Space Center in Russia.
This dream is certainly not new. In the 1920s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of the Soviet Union and his colleague Fridrickh Tsander of Latvia, who both delved heavily in astronautics and rocketry, recorded their ideas for immense, ultra-thin mirrors propelled to "cosmic velocities" as is noted by Joel Grossman in journal of Engineering & Science #4 of 2000, published by Caltech. In the 1950s popularity of this idea picked up and in 1963 gained its biggest boost with the book titled The Wind from the Sun, by Arthur C. Clarke. Cont. . .1 2 3
