"Treated to the first public presentation of details of the flight of the first-ever solar sail deployed in space," attendees at the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing had ample reason to celebrate advances in solar sailing at their July meeting in Brooklyn.

In The Space Review, Kieran A. Carroll offers his take on the celebratory mood, putting it in historical context and describing the meeting participants as simultaneously collaborating and competing to advance the field.

While the distinction of having the first operational solar sail in space goes to the Japanese space program for its 315 kg craft, CubeSat pioneers are also developing the technology for their much more diminutive ships, and, in fact, two such efforts, NanoSail-D and LightSail-1 may be launched - NanoSail-D as soon as this fall.

Carroll points out that the economics of the much smaller (and increasingly capable) spacecraft are putting once unattainable goals within reach. The Space Review:

One significant theme underlying many of the presentations at the symposium is that the ultra-miniaturization of satellites in the recently-booming nanosatellite field has been highly useful to the solar sailing community. On a solar sail the “bus” is part of the overhead mass, which reduces sail maneuverability, and the lower this mass the better; nanosats (best-known as the widespread CubeSat variant) have finally driven down the mass of satellite buses to the point where they open up the prospect of quite-maneuverable solar sail spacecraft with reasonably-small sail areas. Even more importantly at the moment, the very-low-cost “microspace” engineering development and management approach used by many microsat and nanosat developers has brought the cost threshold down to the point of matching the slender budgets that solar sailors are currently able to scrounge, enabling many in the current crop of solar sail technology demonstration missions.

With active development of CubeSat (KySat-1 is in flight trim now) and "CubeLab" programs (the first of two Kentucky-built NanoRacks Platforms, as well as the plug-and-play micro-labs, are at work on the ISS now), Kentucky Space has certainly taken advantages of those economics, developing the human capital and physical infrastructure needed to carry on the business of low cost, high value space exploration, a feat noted recently in Space News. Once only associated with fast horses, coal, bourban and baskeball, the commonwealth has now reached space multiple times in pursuit of "once unattainable" goals. A new association is following, at least for those who think outside the atmosphere.

Pictured here is IKAROS, sails deployed, taken by a daughter craft, which snapped the occasion.

Wayne

Image: JAXA

Among several teams mentioned recently by NewScientist in a piece on the Google Lunar X-PRIZE, Team FREDNET is taking an open source approach to winning, saying it believes it can attract the talent needed to claim the $20 million "moonshot jackpot" at minimal cost.

Rather than a wheeled rover envisioned by many other teams, Team FREDNET would like to land a wheel. At roughly 500 grams, it's spherical picorover certainly has conceptual simplicity going for it, and the team has made some progress on the idea. Check out the recent test of a "donut" prototype below. 

More pictures and video may be found on the team's site.

Like Euroluna, a Google Lunar X-PRIZE competitor that has discussed using a three-unit CubeSat (think of a big loaf of bread) that would fly to, land and rove the lunar surface, Team FREDNET is going small to win big.

Wayne

How is the "ISS open for business?"

At the recent NewSpace 2010 conference, panelists discussed the possibility of doing business on the International Space Station. On the panel was Kentucky Space founder Kris Kimel, whose participation begins shortly after the 38 minute mark.

Having built and delivered two platforms to host "CubeLab" experiments in micro-G, Kentucky Space is currently operating on station with its strategic partner, NanoRacks LLC.

Other panelists included Jason Crusan - Chief Technologist for Space Operations at NASA; Jeff Smith - NASA Ames Branch Chief, Radiation & Space Biotechnologies; and Bruce Pittman, Chief Systems Engineer and Director, Flight Payloads for the Emerging Commercial Space Office, NASA Ames.

Wayne

Enceladus' southern geysers are visible in this gorgeous image returned by Cassini. The geysers create Saturn's E ring, in which the moon orbits.

Wayne

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute