UCI physicist announces plans for satellite to be ‘boosted’ into orbit by a microwave beam

11 November 2002: The Planetary Socety has requested that we add these factual corrections to correct substantial errors made in the original press release from UC Irvine:

Special cosmos sail uses earth-bound energy to assist ascent

Irvine, Calif. — UC Irvine physicist Gregory Benford will
announce plans for the first known attempt to push a
spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit with energy beamed up
from the ground.

Benford will give details on the unique project at the
First International Symposium on Beamed-Energy Propulsion
(ISBEP) Wednesday, Nov. 6, at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville.

The joint UCI-Microwave Sciences Inc. mission will take
place next spring, commencing with the satellite launching
from a Russian submarine off the coast of St. Petersburg.
Benford and his brother, James Benford, the president of
Microwave Sciences, will chair two sessions on microwave-
powered propulsion during the symposium. They will also
answer questions about the upcoming mission at a press
conference at 5:30 p.m. CST, on Tuesday, Nov. 5.

The satellite will be called the Cosmos Sail, the first
solar-sail craft to orbit Earth. The Benfords developed
the sail with researchers from the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. Made from lightweight layers of aluminized
mylar, the sail will allow a craft to be propelled
from low orbit to high orbit and ultimately into
interplanetary space, driven by microwave energy, similar
to the way wind pushes a sailboat across the sea. By
using these electromagnetic waves, spacecraft would burn
significantly less engine fuel — the most prohibitive
expense of interplanetary voyaging.

In describing the launch project, Gregory Benford, a NASA
consultant for the Mars Outpost project, said once the
spacecraft is at about 800 kilometers altitude, its sail
will be deployed. After the craft is flown in its first
trials, a microwave beam emitted from the Jet Propulsion
Lab’s Goldstone 70-meter antennae in California’s Mojave
Desert will be used to give the spacecraft an extra push.

Instruments on board the satellite will measure how much
the sail accelerates due to the microwave boost.

While the push received from the Goldstone microwave beam
will not be strong, it will be significant, since the
spacecraft’s mission is to test the feasibility of
beam-boosted sails.

“The basic ability to move energy and force through space
weightlessly is key to a genuinely 21st century type of
spacecraft,” Benford said. “This marks a significant
attempt to make space travel more effective and
cost-efficient.”

Press conference information

The symposium will be in the Bevill Center at The
University of Alabama in Huntsville. The pressroom and
the Tuesday night press conference will be in Bevill
Center, room 261. For reporters unable to attend, an
interactive conference-call system with a limited number
of outside lines will be in place.

Reporters interested in participating in the conference
call should dial (256) 864-2652 no
earlier than 5 p.m. CST.

Additional information about the Cosmos Sail mission will
be posted on the ISBEP Web site:
http://urnet.uah.edu/isbep/.
Other material from the ISBEP program will also be posted
to that Web site.

The complete symposium program schedule, with the names of
the presenters and their topics, is available online at
http://146.229.208.56/Program.html

More information about the symposium is available online at
http://lpw.uah.edu/Home.html

[NOTE: An image supporting this release is available at
http://today.uci.edu/image_library/press_release/167fig.jpg (89KB)]