2024-04-17 18:00:00
NASA’s space sailboat graphics./Kim Seong-gyu
French writer Bernard Werber’s novel ‘Papillon’ features a giant spaceship built to leave Earth. This spacecraft, named Papillon, has a pair of butterfly-like wings and uses the solar wind as power to navigate deep space. Reminiscent of this novel, a new concept spaceship that sails through space using the repulsive force of sunlight bounces off the anchor. Just as a sailing ship sails the sea with the power of the wind, a ‘space sailing ship’ unfolds its sails and orbits under the power of light particles. It is expected to be a technology that will open a new chapter in space exploration as it enables long-term space exploration at low cost.
◇’Space sailboat’ becomes a reality
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that it will launch the next-generation space sailboat from the Mahia Launch Complex in New Zealand on the 24th. NASA will launch the ‘advanced complex space sailboat’ that it has been developing for the past several years by mounting it on ‘CubeSat’, a micro-satellite the size of a microwave oven. The space sailboat will orbit in a sun-synchronous orbit 1,000 km above the ground. The Electron rocket from Rocket Lab, an American private space company, will be used to launch the space sailboat.
This space sailboat consists of four huge triangular sails that come together to form a square shape. Each side is 9m, and the total size is about 80m2. When it lands on the target orbit, carbon fiber masts about 7 meters long are spread out in four directions, and the sail is wide open. According to NASA, it takes 25 minutes for the space sailboat to fully unfold. The sail is made of ‘polymer’, a high molecular material, and its thickness is 2.5㎛ (micrometer), which is about 1/40th of a human hair. The sail is coated with aluminum, so it is expected that the space sailboat will be visible to the naked eye in some areas at certain times, like stars in the night sky.
Graphics = Kim Seong-gyu
The biggest advantage of a space sailboat is that it does not require additional fuel once it reaches its target orbit. Existing spacecraft require a continuous supply of fuel such as liquid hydrogen or kerosene to maintain power, but space sailing ships can operate by gaining propulsion as long as they can receive sunlight.
It moves by bouncing off photons (particles of light) emitted by the sun into space with four sails. The momentum of the photon is small, so the propulsion force is minimal at first, but the longer it stays in space, the faster it can accelerate. It is estimated that if the space sailboat receives sunlight for a month, it will be able to increase its navigation speed to 550 km per hour. In theory, if it continues to be exposed to sunlight, its speed can increase to 10-20% of the speed of light (300,000 km per second).
There have been previous cases where the private sector launched space sailing ships. In 2019, the American non-profit scientific organization ‘Planetary Society’ launched the space sailboat ‘Lightsail 2’. The organization was founded by astronomer Carl Sagan, famous for his best-selling book ‘Cosmos’. Sagan has been thinking about space sailing ships since the 1970s.
Lightsail 2, which has a side length of 5.6m, performed its mission stably while maintaining an altitude of 600 to 700 km above the ground. After orbiting the Earth for more than three years, the aircraft burned up and disappeared as it entered the atmosphere in November 2022. The Planetary Society shared Lightsail 2’s space exploration information with NASA.
◇Inflating living space in space
‘Space habitat’ technologies that will be used when moving to the Moon and Mars are also being developed one after another. The inflatable space habitat, which space startup ‘Max Space’ recently announced that it will test launch in 2026, is 20m³ in size and is launched in a compressed form inside a rocket and inflated like a balloon in space. When leaving Earth, it takes up about the size of two suitcases, but when it arrives on the Moon or Mars, it expands like a plastic greenhouse so that people can live there. Max Space said, “We need to make living spaces for use in space much cheaper and larger,” and added, “We will release a variety of inflatable habitats ranging from 20 to 1,000 m³.” The company’s goal is to launch a large habitat to replace the International Space Station (ISS). They claim that a similar-sized building can be built for $200 million (about 280 billion won), which is only 0.2% of the ISS construction cost.
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