Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station Japan's wooden satellite, LignoSat, has been deployed into orbit from the International Space Station (ISS). Wooden panels of LignoSat (credit: Kyoto University) LignoSat (pic credit: Kyoto University) - click to enlarge LignoSat was sent to the ISS in November 2024 on a mission to demonstrate that wood could be a viable …
The radar transparency of a wooden satelite should be easy enough to fix: just cover its exterior with a suitable reflective material: very thin aluminium foil, a coat of bright white paint, or a coat of thin epoxy, cellulose lacquer or clear varnish containing aluminium powder should work equally well, though the white paint or aluminium powder paint would be easier to apply than the foil sheet would be.
Using any of these structures should result in satellites that are light, cheap, durable when in space and more or less guaranteed to fully disintegrate when re-entering the atmosphere.
Or even easier, just glue a Tile™ or an Apple AirTag™ to the satellite and never lose it again, with the only requirement being as long as it's in bluetooth range of someone's phone.
On a related note, remind me, how "low" is "low Earth orbit"? Cos if we're talking 32' or less, this is definitely a viable solution and I are a rocket scientist and should get an award.
How is this for blue sky thinking out of the box?
Wallace would give them an up vote.
(for the non Brits amoungst us please refer to the documentary- A Grand Day Out).
I cant help feeling that Mr Musk is really a penguin in disguise, not just a bad odour sorounding the trup man.
See - The Wrong Trousers, and A Murder Most Fowl for furthet evidence.
The blind mitre dovetail joints are very neat (both senses.) I had to zoom in to see how they worked - more cabinet making than (bush) carpentry.
The bevel along the outer edges where they meet a very nice touch.
Also nice that the pencil marks across the base of the tenons indicating the depth of the mortise were left for the photograph.
I can only envy the craftsmanship.
Will the debris be less damaging/polluting than when a metal framed satellite it hit - thus reducing impact of Kessler syndrome ?
I suppose that the contents will still contain much metal, so the box/contents ratio might be important.
How many knots is escape velocity?
40,320 km/h ~ 21771 knots (nœuds?)
I remember seeing a doco about an abandoned space gun in a US desert (Project HARP?) which projected payloads into I think suborbital flight but I recall my amusement at the artillery using wooden sabots to cocoon the metal payload. That the sabots could survive being shot up a 16" (~400mm) cannon speak to the toughness of dead trees.
Plywoods and other laminates incorporating very thin metal foils might be a viable construction material for space.
Boffins need to take a leaf (sorry) from Larry Niven's Known Universe series and genetically engineer stage trees with a hollow space at the top for cargo and/or crew.
Indeed! Back in 2022 Laura's story on LignoSat (being designed) also mentioned a Scandinavian competitor: the WISA Woodsat (from Finland), but its launch is still delayed I guess (some issue with radios?) ...
Meanwhile, power the thing with a Swiss paper battery, or a Swedish-Finnish Lignode, and you're a step closer to a full IKEA design ... if only some Swedes could invent a ... I don't know ... wooden transistor! Yessir, IKEA rymdsatellit!
This was my thought as well. You would never be able to make use of any optical device due to the outgassing components, that include star sensors for positioning, so it would be very limited in use cases. Unless of course they have found some way to reduce/prevent the outgassing. But it's a hard enough topic with known materials, let alone wood!
Outgassing can be studied to a large extent on the ground
A cow-orker who operates vacuum chambers in a space science facility I worked at was fairly dismissive of these proosals and made it clear that "over his dead body" would they go anywhere near his test chambers due to the contamination issues they posed
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