Today In History

Most of you probably know that SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy today. What you might not know is that a satellite aboard that rocket was built by a few Vector employees 10 years ago and the project actually has ties back to the pre-SpaceX days involving Vector's founders.

LightSail 2 launched on the Falcon Heavy today and was built under the auspices of the Planetary Society who led the project since about 2006. It is the second of a series of CubeSats that launched with a solar sail capability. A good summary of LightSail and the launch today can be read at: https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/spacex-falcon-heavy-solar-sail-lightsail2.html

The story of Lightsail goes back as far as 1999 when John Garvey (Vector co-founder) and I got a call from our mutual friend Lou Friedman who was then Executive Director of the Planetary Society. Lou had been a longtime advocate of using solar sails in space and even wrote a book on it. He also wrote a great history of the project and you can see that here: https://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/lightsail-solar-sailing/story-of-lightsail-part-1.html. 

In 1999 and 2000, Lou had been working with what was then an ‘internet boom company’ in Pasadena known as Blastoff which was part of the IdeaLab startup incubator. Blastoff was looking to fund a privately built solar sail spacecraft using IdeaLab money. Lou invited me to accompany him and Bill Gross to Moscow to discuss having several Russian organizations build and launch such a mission. We made that trip and came back empty handed. That led to the next mission: Cosmos-1.

Cosmos-1 was the result of Bill Gross not being interested ultimately in funding the initial solar sail mission that Lou had proposed. Instead Lou had found money from the Arts and Entertainment network to fund a private solar sail built by the same Russian organizations and launched aboard a Russian submarine on a converted SLBM (an SS-N-18 to be precise). This story can be found here:https://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/lightsail-solar-sailing/story-of-lightsail-part-2.html. 

I managed the project and the mission operations for which there were two launches. Both launches failed for different reasons which was surprising since these launchers were operational weapons systems. It was nonetheless an interesting project. 

A&E funded the project along with Cosmos Studios (run by Carl Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan) as source material for a documentary entitled “Swords to Plowshares”. The documentary was never completed as the studio producing it had made another small movie called ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding” that became a big hit and swamped them with other commitments. So much for the fame side of the mission.

Following Cosmos-1, Elon Musk called out of the blue looking for someone who could help him buy Russian launch vehicles. Guess who that might be ? I immediately called colleagues to help and we started working with Elon to design the mission that he was thinking of - a private mission to Mars to show that ‘humanity could be a multi planetary species’ and buy the Russian launchers. When we were unsuccessful in buying the desired Russian rockets, Elon proclaimed on a plane back from Russia that ‘we will build the rocket ourselves”. That was what started SpaceX. Turns out that while we were working on Elon's Mars mission, several colleagues from the Mars Oasis mission were showing him rockets built in the garage. This inspired Elon so much that the three of them started working secretly on a spreadsheet design of what became the Falcon 1. History in the making but we didn’t know it at the time.

After I left SpaceX, I returned to the topic of building spacecraft and Lou was getting the itch to build another solar sail. Undeterred, Lou and I continued to noodle over the idea of a private solar sail mission when I proposed the idea of a cubesat with a solar sail. All the logic pointed to this as a good combination. Lou managed to find other private donors and we set out to build another set of spacecraft. For this mission, I was the project manager and we hired Stellar Space Systems in San Luis Obispo to build the spacecraft. Stellar was run by Tomas Svitek who I had known since grad school where he was a geology student at Caltech and a refugee from the “socialist worker’s paradise of Czechoslovakia”. That was 1987 after all. Tomas also had hired someone who was to become a Vectornaut - Brian Riskas - who also worked at Vector.  Brian designed the deployment mechanisms for LightSail. The story of Lightsail can be read here: https://www.planetary.org/explore/projects/lightsail-solar-sailing/story-of-lightsail-part-3.html

Today when the rocket launched a satellite that had involvement from those of us at Vector that built it on a rocket from a company that several of us had a hand in starting, well, it was a special moment. I wanted to take this moment and share with all of you this very interesting tale that connects so many of us to the mission that we are on here at Vector: revolutionizing space access. That this started really 20 years ago and finally came to fruition today speaks to the long timeline and the difficulty of our mission. It also reminds me of why what we are doing at Vector is important. I hope that you all can share a bit in the pride that I feel in what we are doing and how this effort is really a part of a much larger Vector mission that we are all here for.