So Jisc Futurist Martin Hamilton took to the pages of the venerable Ariadne to call for the inception of a Jisc Space Program Project. As specified, it’s a fairly simple mission.
- Part one: Get a tiny SD card and fill it with the finest that Terran civilization can offer. Martin suggested Wikipedia (weighing in at a cool 12GB) and a few books from Project Gutenberg – you’d obviously add in a few other things (for my money the UKOER evaluation and synthesis wiki, Cogdog’s Flickr archive and episodes 1-12 of Yacht Rock….)
- Part two: Send it to moon.
- Part three: Profit!
But the really silly thing here is how (comparatively) easy and cheap part two could be.
Starting with some numbers: the base price for getting a functioning satellite into space is just $8,000. If I sold my car and Brian Lamb sold his car then we’re nearly there. That money gets you a base kit for a TubeSat (a beer-can sided hunk o’metal and PCB that can broadcast a signal back to earth) and puts whatever you do with it into low earth orbit. Thinking bigger, you can have a CubeSat (a 10cm cube) up there for $12,500, including the base kit. Both of these come under the emerging spacefaring category of pico-satellites.
By simply affixing the SD card to the satellite frame of our choice (probably with a tried-and-tested space adhesive like duct tape), we’re already backing up gigabytes of data in space for a laughably small amount of money.
But low earth orbit ain’t enough for Hamilton – nope, to avoid the all-engulfing apocalypse he predicts he wants data on the actual moon. Funnily enough, NASA are already working on a project to send a CubeSat to the moon with a solar sail. A solar sail is just what it sounds like, a shiny sheet that allows the constant energy from the sun to push an object forward in space. It’s slow, but (comparatively) cheap and it will get you there. And all we need to add to our craft is a means of deploying such a sail when low orbit is reached.
Now we’re traveling in space we have to start thinking about steering and trajectories and suchlike. I’d be looking at something like these nano-thrusters (powered by Teflon, no less) to get us pointing in the right direction. And we’d now need some kind of on-board computer to control everything, maybe a smartphone. And thus a couple of solar cell arrays to power the thing.
(a note: the physics and the software development involved here are a huge deal… I’m largely ignoring this to make a point but there would be – even if we could build on well-documented previous projects the cost of this would be enormous)
(of course, Jisc are off the pace here: the University of Surrey already launched a smartphone into space as a functional satellite in 2013.)
So, we’re basically at the moon for a little over £12,000. Now all we need to do is land, or at least crash in a controlled way that protects our precious cargo.
In the bad old days a lunar lander had a whole assembly, with thrusters, just for this. But we don’t have enough room – so I’d propose that once we got near enough to the moon an inflatable cushion would cover the satellite. The small amount of explosion needed to deploy this could be used to get rid of the solar sail and get us moving towards the surface of the moon at speed. As soon as we hit the rocks it would gently deflate, meaning that we wouldn’t bounce off and get lost in space.
And there Martin’s SD card will lie, undisturbed, for many years – until it is discovered and read by intelligent aliens as a testament to the former existence of a race of beings that didn’t quite make it.
Leave a Reply