Nextbigfuture has a weekly video review of the big stories in science and technology. The later part of the video discusses laser pushed sails for fast missions around the solar system and then interstellar missions.
We have the laser technology that is sufficient to be used for laser pushed sail missions. They need to be mass produced. The military will be buying powerful combat lasers by the thousands in the 2030s. Industry will continue to buy and build more and more lasers, which will lower the costs.
NASA and Breakthrough Starshot (funded by Billionaries Yuri Milner, Zuckerberg and others) are funding the laser pushed sail program. There will be small orbital tests by 2030. There should be a mission to send something by the moon with a few hours flight time versus days with Apollo style chemical rockets.
There are many missions for scaled up probes to everywhere in the solar system. Once the system is scaled to a gigawatt (with solar panels and batteries or a dedicated nuclear reactor) then the marginal cost of more missions is tiny.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Paraphrased (apologies for…)
We soon will have sufficient laser technology for laser-pushed sail missions. Critically, the lasers and sails need to be mass produced.
For example the military wants powerful combat lasers by the thousands in the 2030s. Industry will continue to buy and build more lasers, which inevitably will lower costs.
NASA and Breakthrough Starshot are funding the laser-pushed sail program, and intend small orbital tests by 2030. They also are planning a mission to send something PAST the moon with transit of a few hours flight time versus days with Apollo style chemical rockets.
There are many missions for scaled up probes to everywhere in the solar system. Once the system is scaled to the gigawatt level (with solar panels and batteries or a dedicated nuclear reactor) then the marginal cost of more missions is relatively tiny.
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I agree with most of this projection. The experimentation to examine the viability of using orbital laser thrusted photon sails is vital to sending microsatellites to swiftly examine remote interplanetary objects, economically. In many ways they may become tomorrow’s Instamatic™ cameras. Buy ’em, use ’em once, and discard ’em because they’re so cheap.
Ideally these Instamatic™ space probes would have enough mass to include decent optics for imaging, perhaps some compact chip-sized physics instrumentation to measure magnetism, temperatures, that kind of thing. And powerful CHIRP-microwave transmitters to send results back in near-real time.
The things that concern me are issues which are hard to resolve “at scale”. When sending a SpaceWhisp™ to Luna, well, its pretty close. 400,000 km more or less. That’s pretty close. Such SpaceWhisp™ probes really couldn’t do anything science-wise on-or-at Luna that way-more-conventional chemical probes can accomplish in a few months or years. But they DEMO the tech.
The real issues are when sending the SpaceWhisps™ to quite remote objects of interest. You know, kilometer-diameter KBO (Kuiper Belt Objects) swimming through interplanetary space some 50 to 250 AU. These objects are particularly interesting for close observation, to flesh out Astrophysics assessment of the formation of the Solar System. Also, for getting close-up photos … and astronomical bolometry (measure of reflected sunlight), to better gauge the mass of them collectively. There are after all something between tens of millions and billions of these things out there, far, far too distant from Earth’s spying telescopes (and too small) to be detected at all.
The stars? Although easy to imagine (as they have been!), such missions seem to me to be vexed with the return-of-data problem … combined with distance and the very real need to “vector the craft” mid flight. Not so easily addressed.
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Well, here’s to hoping.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
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