Sunshine-Propelled Craft Is Set to Sail in Space

The remaining partners are NPO Lavochkin, the quasi-independent Russian agency that designed the spacecraft, and the Russian Academy of Science's Space Research Institute. In addition, the Russian government will provide the submarine that will launch Cosmos 1 as the nose-cone payload aboard a modified Soviet-era Volna ballistic missile.

Undertaking the project "was an easy decision," Druyan said. "We were using a real weapon of mass destruction as a means to ride the light to the stars. We could make history for the price of a New York apartment."

The submerged submarine will launch Cosmos 1 from the Barents Sea and needs to put it into orbit 500 miles above Earth to get it above the atmosphere's residual drag. "Anything lower, and it won't move," said former JPL engineer Harris M. "Bud" Schurmeier, the project's leading systems engineer .

The Cosmos 1 spacecraft weighs 231 pounds, and contains the electronics that enable the sail to send and receive signals from the ground. The solar-sail assembly, which weighs an additional 88 pounds, is composed of eight sail segments made of thin Mylar-like material. Once unfurled, the array looks a bit like the vanes of a windmill. The segments are approximately 50 feet long on each side.

NASA is working on two designs to put a 531-pound payload into space with a 287-pound solar-sail system. Johnson said NASA is looking at four-segment sail configurations about 120 yards long and 53 yards wide in all -- the size of a football field.

Friedman said the Cosmos 1 ground team will wait several days before trying to deploy the sail segments. "When you pack them, there is always a little air left," he said. "If you just opened the compartment, there would be an explosive decompression. You want to gradually let the air leak out."

Each sail segment is held rigid by inflatable struts, which unroll "like one of those New Year's Eve noisemakers you blow into" when they are pumped full of nitrogen, Schurmeier said. A successful deployment is the mission's first goal.

The second is to move the sail. Once deployed, the spacecraft's orbit should grow larger as the sail adds speed. Friedman said the Cosmos 1 team will know whether this happens from micro-accelerator readings inside the spacecraft. People everywhere on Earth might eventually be able to see the sail with the naked eye, but chances will be better the further south one is.

Even if successful, however, Cosmos 1 will not last long. The beating from ultraviolet radiation will degrade the sail material, and within a few weeks, the nitrogen will start leaking from the struts, making it difficult and ultimately impossible to trim the sail segments so they continue to catch the sunlight.

But a few weeks will be enough. "This is proof of concept," Schurmeier said. "We want to make a contribution and move this method of propulsion forward."