Solar-sail mission reflects past and future

Where do we sail from here?
The extent of Cosmos 1's success or failure may not be known until days or weeks after Tuesday's launch. But if the mission team fulfills its main objectives, Cosmos 1 would merit a prominent place in aerospace history, said Michael Martin-Smith, a British physician, amateur astronomer and member of the British Interplanetary Society.

Martin-Smith has written a book and numerous articles on spaceflight, and has presented papers at annual congresses of the International Astronautical Federation.

“Cosmos 1, of course, aims to do more than demonstrate thrust by solar radiation,” he observed recently on a leading space discussion forum. “It also aims to demonstrate steerability by a process analogous to old-time sail tacking.”

In addition, he said, “if the mission endures, it is planned to use a radio telescope to beam power from here on Earth to add propulsive force as well.”

If those three tasks are accomplished, “it would be fair to claim that Cosmos 1 is, potentially, to interstellar travel what the Wrights' Flyer was to modern aviation — and possibly even over a comparable historical time frame,” Martin-Smith argued.

He is now campaigning for a particular application of space sails that involves not just propulsion but the discovery of potential targets for future exploration, fully consistent with Kepler’s four-century-old vision.

“The looming discovery of Earthlike planets is likely to have an inspirational effect,” he wrote in an e-mail to MSNBC.com. “There is nothing like a concrete destination, however hard to reach, to focus the dreams of explorers.”

Along those lines, he pointed to a proposal from the University of Colorado's Webster Cash, which calls for the establishment of a giant space-based pinhole camera to seek out and characterize Earthlike planets. This "New Worlds Imager" would consist of a large sunshade with a "pinhole" that would screen out the glare from a distant star and allow a well-placed 40-inch (1-meter) telescope to examine its planets. The assembly would be placed in a stable position far from Earth.

“The engineering problems of transfer, deployment and control of the sunshade bear an uncanny resemblance to the techniques required for Cosmos 1,” Martin-Smith pointed out. So the same technology that enables interstellar flight might also locate and observe the first real targets for such missions, and in much less time than Kepler’s ghost has already been waiting.

James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.

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