Solar Satellite Craft Ready For Test Run

United Press International

By Ellen Beck

November 6,2002

University of California physicist Gregory Benford is making plans to push a spacecraft into Earth's orbit with energy beamed from the ground. The joint UCI-Microwave Sciences Inc. mission is scheduled for next spring with the launch of a satellite from a Russian submarine off the coast of St. Petersburg. The satellite the Cosmos Sail was developed by Benford and his brother and will be the first solar-sail craft to orbit Earth. It is made of lightweight layers of aluminized mylar, which will allow it to be propelled from low orbit to high orbit and then into interplanetary space by ground-based microwave energy, similiar to the way wind pushes a sailboat. The electromagnetic waves burn significantly less engine fuel-the most prohibitive expense of interplanetary voyaging.