Solar Sail Craft Shipwrecked!
This may be the first incidence of a cosmic 'shipwreck' in the original sense of the word. The Planetary Society has been sending me what I always considered spam ever since I got my first issue of "Astronomy" magazine many years ago. I would always just throw out their requests for membership (read: money and lots of it) because I thought they didn't really do anything worth while. But apparently they were funding something completely revolutionary that would have been a step in the right direction. Apparently though it is begining to look like maybe we weren't meant to launch a solar sail powered space craft.
Perhaps there are other forces at work here than we scientists like to admit? Or maybe a more reasonable explaination is that Russian sucks at putting things in space (although thier human record is pretty impressive). Think about it; all three attepts to put test solar sail technology in space have failed because of Russian hardware failures.
I had previously posted on SpaceAlumni.com a comment about the failure that went something like this:
The comment came from an interest I had in Russia's use of Cold War ICBMs as launch vehicles for commercial and private satellite launches. Though it sucks that Cosmos 1 was lost because of booster failure, it was Russian ballistic missile technology that failed, technology that was at one point meant to destroy us. I just find that interesting.
In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere. Russia tried again in 2001, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere.
Perhaps there are other forces at work here than we scientists like to admit? Or maybe a more reasonable explaination is that Russian sucks at putting things in space (although thier human record is pretty impressive). Think about it; all three attepts to put test solar sail technology in space have failed because of Russian hardware failures.
I had previously posted on SpaceAlumni.com a comment about the failure that went something like this:
ICBM Technology Fails to Deliver Payload! Today, a sad day. During the Cold War, a very happy day that would have saved lives. Just an interesting way to look at things...How many ICBMs has Russia launched successfully carrying space bound payloads anyways? It sounds like such a good idea, just wondering how it is going for them.
The comment came from an interest I had in Russia's use of Cold War ICBMs as launch vehicles for commercial and private satellite launches. Though it sucks that Cosmos 1 was lost because of booster failure, it was Russian ballistic missile technology that failed, technology that was at one point meant to destroy us. I just find that interesting.
posted by Dan at 3:01 PM
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