Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Spacecraft Fails, Space Agency Says

Sean Markey
National Geographic News

June 22, 2005

Russian space agency officials said Cosmos 1, the world's first solar sail spacecraft, failed to reach space yesterday.

Agency spokesman Vyacheslav Davidenko told the Associated Press in Moscow that the Volna booster rocket that carried the spacecraft failed 83 seconds after it was launched from a Russian nuclear submarine under the Barents Sea.

"The booster's failure means that the solar sail vehicle was lost," he said.

The four-million-dollar (U.S.), joint mission was the brainchild of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group of space enthusiasts based in Pasadena, California.

Equipped with eight windmill-like Mylar sails, Cosmos 1 was designed to harness the power of solar winds—the stream of charged particles emitted by our sun.

The spacecraft was expected to orbit Earth once every hundred minutes and remain aloft for about a month.

Project backers said the mission's principal goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of solar-sail-powered flight.

A secondary goal was a "social experiment—the ability of a private group of enthusiasts to launch a space mission," project director Louis Friedman, said in a media statement.

In theory, spacecraft powered by solar sails are capable of nearly constant acceleration in the void of space.

The vehicles have no need for conventional engines and thus never run out of fuel. Solar-sail proponents say the experimental vehicles, while still unproven, could offer the fastest and most feasible means of interstellar space travel.

Backers add that solar-sail spacecraft that venture beyond the reach of our sun's rays could be powered by Earth-based lasers trained on the crafts' sails.

Several countries, including Russia, Japan, and the United States, have experimented with solar-sail technology. But none have used solar sails as the sole means of propulsion in a spacecraft.

Slim Hope

In a statement released earlier today, the Planetary Society said it mostly agreed with the Russian space agency's assessment that Cosmos 1 was lost.

But the nonprofit also noted that the Cosmos 1 team "observed what appear to be signals" from the spacecraft as it traveled over ground stations in eastern Russia, the Marshall Islands, and Czech Republic shortly after launch.

"This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended," the statement said. It noted, however, that the "project team now considers this to be a very small probability."

Despite the daunting odds, mission scientists continued efforts to contact Cosmos 1. The nonprofit said it was working with the U.S. Strategic Command, which tracks military space missions, to gather additional data on Cosmos 1.

"If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after [four] days the sails could automatically deploy," the Planetary Society said. "While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time."

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