Sail Concepts

Just how big does a spacecraft have to be to do productive work? It’s a provocative question in this era of CubeSats and downsized budgets, but when you start thinking interstellar, there are even more reasons to wonder how small you can make your vehicle. After all, the propulsion challenges facing interstellar missions are profound, [...]

Spacecraft no more than an inch square will fly aboard the next (and last) Shuttle flight to the International Space Station. The work of Mason Peck (Cornell University), the micro-satellites weigh in at less than one ten-millionth of the mass of the original Sputnik, yet can accomodate all the systems we associate with a spacecraft [...]

Good fortune continues to smile on Japan’s IKAROS solar sail. First of all, we can point to the image at left, a small shot to be sure but an amazing one nonetheless. Emily Lakdawalla explains on the Planetary Society’s blog that IKAROS’ transmitter is not powerful, so that it took a full two weeks to [...]

Suppose we have developed an Earth-Moon industrial system, one that lets us use an electric launch system on the Moon to upload mass for chemical processing and the extraction of raw materials. What’s the next step toward extending it to the entire system? One idea, as Joseph Friedlander has been explaining on the NextBigFuture blog, [...]