In the French writer Bernard Werber’s novel ‘Papillon’ there is a large spaceship built to leave Earth. This spacecraft, named Papillon, has a pair of butterfly-like wings and uses the solar wind as power to navigate deep. Reminiscent of this novel, a new concept spacecraft that floats through space using the repulsive force of sunlight bounces off its anchor. Just as a sailboat sails the sea with the power of the wind, a ‘spaceship’ opens its sails and travels under the power of particles of light. It is expected to be a technology that will open a new chapter in space exploration as it enables long-term space exploration at a low cost.
◇ ‘Space sailboat’ becomes a reality
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that they will launch a next generation spacecraft from the Mahia Launch Center in New Zealand on the 24th. NASA will launch the ‘advanced complex spacecraft’ it has been developing for several years by mounting it on a ‘CubeSat’, a micro-satellite the size of a microwave oven. The spacecraft revolves in a sun-synchronous orbit 1,000 km above the earth. The Electron rocket from Rocket Lab, an American private space company, will be used to launch the spacecraft.
This space sailboat consists of four large triangular sails that come together to form a square shape. Each side is 9m, and the total size is about 80m2. When it lands on the target orbit, carbon fiber masts about 7 meters long are spread out in four directions, and the sail is wide open. According to NASA, it will take 25 minutes for the space shuttle to open completely. The sail is made of ‘polymer’, a high molecular material, and its thickness is 2.5㎛ (micrometer), which is about 1/40th of a human hair. The sail is covered with aluminum, so the spacecraft is expected to be visible to the naked eye in certain areas at certain times, like stars in the night sky.
Graphics = Kim Seog-gyu
The biggest advantage of a spaceship is that it does not need additional fuel when it reaches the target target. Existing spacecraft require a continuous supply of fuel such as liquid hydrogen or kerosene to maintain power, but space navigation vessels can operate by propelling themselves as long as they receive sunlight.
It moves by bouncing off photons (particles of light) that the sun emits into space with four sails. The movement of the photon is small, so the displacement force is not so small at first, but the longer it stays in space, the faster it can accelerate. It is believed that if the space shuttle receives sunlight for a month, it will be able to increase the sailing speed to 550 km per hour. In theory, if it is still exposed to sunlight, its speed can increase to 10-20% of the speed of light (300,000 km per second).
There have been previous cases where the private sector has launched space navigation vessels. In 2019, the American non-profit scientific organization ‘Planetary Society’ launched the spaceship ‘Lightsail 2’. This group was founded by the astronomer Carl Sagan, who was famous for his favorite book ‘Cosmos’. Sagan has been thinking about spaceships since the 1970s.
Lightsail 2, which has a side length of 5.6m, performed its mission stably while maintaining an altitude of 600 to 700 km above the ground. After orbiting the Earth for more than three years, the spacecraft burned up and disappeared as it entered the atmosphere in November 2022. The Planetary Society shared the Lightsail space probe information 2 by NASA.
◇ Increases habitability in space
‘Space habitat’ technologies are also being developed to be used when moving to the Moon and Mars one after the other. The inflatable space habitat, which the space pioneer ‘Max Space’ recently announced that it will test launch in 2026, in a volume of 20m³ and launched in compact form inside a rocket and inflated like a balloon in space. When you leave the Earth, it will take about the size of two suitcases, but when it reaches the Moon or Mars, it will expand like a plastic greenhouse so that people can live there. Max Space said, “We need to make living spaces for use in space much cheaper and larger,” and he added, “We will release several deployable habitats between 20 and 1,000 m³.” The company’s goal is to launch a large campus to replace the International Space Station (ISS). They claim that a building of the same size can be built for $200 million (about 280 billion won), which does not exist. but 0.2% of the cost of building the ISS.
