(USA Today) CAPE CANAVERAL — One mission will fly under a cloak of darkness,
another will test flying by light. The Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane and a citizen-funded solar sailing experiment headline an eclectic group of spacecraft targeting an 11:05 a.m. ET launch Wednesday from Cape Canaveral atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
The entire launch window won't be made public until Wednesday because of the the unpiloted mini-shuttle's mostly classified mission — the fourth by a military program moving its operations from California to Kennedy Space Center.
But in a somewhat strange pairing, the same launch brought Bill Nye the Science Guy, who is CEO of The Planetary Society, to Cape Canaveral on Tuesday to discuss the organization's first LightSail mission. "You can go to very distant destinations in the solar system without any fuel," the bow tie-clad Nye explained of the solar sailing technology, speaking to reporters at the Air Force's Space and Missile History Center. "You can do it much more cheaply."
Through donations from more than 40,000 of its members, including some large gifts by undisclosed donors, the non-profit Planetary Society raised $4.3 million to develop the LightSail mission.
No bigger than a loaf of bread, the spacecraft is the first of two designed to deploy a square sheet of Mylar measuring 322 square feet.
The sail will catch the sun's steady stream of radiation to maneuver the spacecraft, a bit more slowly than traditional chemical propulsion. A small satellite could reach the moon in a month rather than days, said Nye, or head for Mars or an asteroid.
"You get a continuous very small push, indefinitely," he said. "You can tack, just like a sailboat, this really elegant, wonderful thing."
The spacecraft launching Wednesday is one of 10 small satellites known as CubeSats that are hitching rides with the X-37B. The National Reconnaissance Officesponsored nine of them, while NASA facilitated the launch of the first LightSail mission.
Only in orbit for about a month, "LightSail A" won't actually sail but will serve as a shakedown cruise ahead of next year's planned launch by a SpaceX Falcon Heavyrocket of "Lightsail B" on a months-long sailing demonstration.
This test mission hopes to confirm that booms will properly deploy the sail's four triangular sections about two weeks after launch, that software can control the spacecraft and that engineers can communicate with it. Cameras are expected to provide some images from space.
Carl Sagan, one of The Planetary Society's founders, embraced the concept of solar sailing as far back as 1976, when he discussed the idea on
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The organization attempted to launch a sail in 2005, but a submarine-launched Russian rocket failed.
A Japanese mission successfully demonstrated solar sailing in 2010, but LightSail will be the first to try it with low-cost CubeSats used widely for university-led missions and increasingly for commercial applications.
A recently announced
Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign quickly raised more than $597,000 supporting next year's LightSail flight.
Said Nye of LightSail's thousands of donors: "Mostly it was people who just think it's cool. They want to participate in space exploration."
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