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Microspace Technology
| Article
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20367 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
2,995 Words |
| Author
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Melinda Gipson
Melinda Gipson is editor of Space Business News and the author
of Microspace Renaissance (Arlington, Va.: Pasha Publications,
1992). |
Scores of man-made satellites hover above the earth's surface. Like guardian angels, some watch over the planet, monitoring its soils and seas. Others offer communications, linking the globe with word of wars or the latest from Walt Disney Studios.
Other man-made satellites have explored our solar system, and a few are even venturing beyond to probe the mysteries of the cosmos and become satellites of the larger galactic center.
It all started 35 years ago with Sputnik 1, a slivery sphere only 20 inches in diameter. Ever since, satellites have gotten bigger, more complex, and more expensive, to the point that many U.S. satellites can be carried only by the space shuttle and only the government can afford them.
Take Milstar, for example: One of the more capable space-craft devised by the military, this massive communications satellite system has already cost more than $5 billion and the first one will not fly until later in 1992. Each copy will cost the Pentagon an additional $1 billion to build and launch.
The Hubble Space Telescope has provided an equally compelling object lesson for civil space planners. Orbited at a cost of more than $2 billion after nearly two decades of development, the Hubble's myopic lenses aptly illustrate the extremely expensive failures that can beset "big science" projects.
Small wonder, then, that Pentagon and civil space planners have for some years been looking to see whether there isn't a better approach to making satellites.
The grandfather of the current trend toward smaller satellites may well have been the Northern Utah Satellite (NUSAT), a 26-sided, 20-inch-diameter sphere that lasted in space for about a year and a half after being released from the shuttle in April 1985. NUSAT was developed by researchers at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, and Utah State University. It was used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to calibrate air traffic control radars--something a satellite removed from the planet's atmosphere could do.
Another forefather of microspace satellites, called the Global Low Rate Message Relay (GLOMR) satellite, was launched just six months after NUSAT by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department's high-technology think tank. It was slightly
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