[FPSPACE] Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Update for June 15, 2005

[LARRY KLAES]

http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/latest_update.html

Solar Sail Update, June 15, 2005

Cosmos1 "Mated" to Volna Rocket in Preparation for Tuesday Launch

by Project Director Louis Friedman

The world’s first solar sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1, is now mated to its Volna 
launch vehicle and ready for its ride into space. This is a great milestone 
in Planetary Society history: we have produced a fully qualified spacecraft 
and have it (figuratively) on the launch pad.

Of course, we are not on a launch pad at all. Cosmos 1 sits on a rocket 
about to be placed into a submarine. The rocket Volna (“wave” in Russian) is 
an intercontinental ballistic missile with its warheads replaced with our 
spacecraft and the orbital-insertion motor that will lift it to the 
outermost edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

Now we are ready to ride a wave into space.

But the hard work is certainly not over. Right now, we are scrambling to 
prepare for mission operations. One aspect of flying a low-cost mission is 
that we can’t hire extra people and field parallel teams. Until this month, 
everyone was busy with spacecraft development and had no time to work on the 
multifaceted aspects of mission operations. The stations in our worldwide 
tracking network are working together for the first time, and we must 
coordinate all our activities over 20 time zones and in two different 
languages.

Cosmos 1 is a complex spacecraft; with it, we are trying things that have 
never been done before. Delivering a spacecraft to the rocket is of course 
only a milestone along the way, but still one of which we are proud.

Our hats are off to all the teams involved, not only for the individual 
tasks accomplished, but also for the unprecedented cooperation and 
coordination among interests ranging from the media (our sponsor, Cosmos 
Studios) to military (the Russian Navy.) In between, we have The Planetary 
Society, the Lavochkin Association, the Space Research Institute of the 
Russian Academy of Sciences, several American and Russian organizations, and 
the many individuals who have helped. We also acknowledge the Makeev Rocket 
Design Bureau of Miass, Russia who built the Volna. Now, the Russian Navy 
will launch it. And we never even would have reached the launch of Cosmos 1 
without the support and enthusiasm of Planetary Society members.

The world’s space agencies are watching our mission with great interest. 
Whatever happens in the next few weeks, we know we have already contributed 
to the development of a new propulsion technology that can revolutionize 
space travel—even as far as the stars.