The latest and perhaps most inspiring example of private space adventurism is a crowd-funded project to resurrect a decades-old NASA spacecraft purely for the engineering challenge and science potential.
For decades, space exploration remained a domain within reach of only government agencies, who could command huge pools of expertise and public funds. Now the means by which our space endeavours are funded have become more diverse, and more and more private space initiatives are appearing.
NASA recently awarded contracts to two private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to build the spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Commercial space tourism, however high-end a proposition it is now, is set to expand. And similar developments are occurring in the field of unmanned spaceflight: Planetary Resources, Inc has the ambitious aim of mining asteroids for minerals.
The age of commercial, private, space adventurism is here.
The latest and perhaps most inspiring example is the crowd-funded project to resurrect a decades-old NASA spacecraft purely for the engineering challenge and science potential. The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 unmanned probe (ISEE-3) was launched by NASA in 1978 to study the flow of particles from the Sun that buffet the Earth’s magnetic field, known as the solar wind. Dispatched to a location between the Sun and Earth where the gravitational pull of our planet and the Sun cancel each other, the spacecraft spent years carrying out its task.
ISEE-3, the Little Spaceship That Could
In the early 1980s, with Halley’s Comet rapidly approaching, NASA was conspicuous by its absence among the international flotilla of spacecraft being assembled to investigate this most famous of comets up close.
Bob Farquhar and the team running ISEE-3 hatched an audacious plan, making the most of ISEE-3’s remaining fuel to perform some complex manoeuvring through a series of changes in orbit and the slingshot effect of the moon, sending it far from Earth. On its new course, ISEE-3 would encounter the smaller Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, beating the international armada heading for Halley by several months. As the temporarily renamed International Cometary Explorer (ICE), it conducted the first-ever comet encounter in September 1985, and was then left to drift in an orbit that would bring it back towards Earth in 2014.
