William Elliot wrote:

At 12:46 PM (PDT) on June 21, 2005, Cosmos 1, a project of The
Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, was launched from a submerged
Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. Cosmos 1 is the first
solar sail spacecraft and is designed to sail on light, using photons
for propulsion in Earth orbit.


Launching satellites from a submerged submarine?
Isn't that about the hardest place to ever to reach orbit from.

In a polar orbit? Anything else that makes orbit insertion more difficult
than usual?

What are they doing? Why there? Don't they have easier places to launch
from or are they showing off their their techological, (and possible
military) command of space?

you'll notice that this is a *private* satellite, 100% funded by
non-government organizations. On a shoestring budget of $4 million IIRC.

The Russians are still scrounging for cash, and they have all these
ballistic missile subs that are too expensive to just scrap but are
utterly without a mission anymore.

So I'm guessing that the Planetary Society simply got a really good deal
from the Russians to do this kind of launch, and they tried to do it as
robustly as they could.

Which is great, this is exactly the kind of experimentation and
improvisation that we need to establish a robust private spaceflight
capability.

The upshot of that, though, is that you use riskier, untried materials
and tactics. So you have much less expensive missions, but you probably
get a higher failure/off-nominal-mission rate until you find something
that works far better than the status quo.

Again, that's wonderful, and the epitome of exploration and discovery.


--
Terrell Miller


"Suddenly, after nearly 30 years of scorn, Prog is cool again".
-Entertainment Weekly