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I wasn’t sure what the article meant by “no screws or glue”, when the photograph appears to have visible screws. But closer images show that these are apparently some sort of rivet?
I found a (Japanese-language-only) news piece that shows some of the crafting and assembly of the satellite, and the box body certainly holds together by itself, via some beautifully intricate joinery:
It looks like there's a metal(?) frame with rivets, screws used to secure internal electronic components, and the internal wood 'body' seems to be assembled with fastener-less joinery. There are some photos of the cubesat without the frame here: https://www.infoespacial.com/texto-diario/mostrar/4304727/ja...
Site with some photos:
https://www.nanosats.eu/sat/lignosat
I kinda want a Norm Abram PBS special on wood satellite crafting techniques
He would need at least 4 routers to make this box. Time to start sending him 1/4" routers to complement his full sized ones.
Indeed it's a woodworking technique called Sashimono which doesn't use any glue or screws, just precise cuts to join wood together.
The Japanese and amazing joinery, name a better combo. So delightful.
I don't speak Japanese, but I can read "10cm" on the video overlay which seems to be about right.
10cm cube has a volume of 1 liter (10^3 ml). That's very wee.
That's the standard for a "cubesat". I believe the industry has standardised on 10cm^3 units for these satellites so that "ridesharing" or multi-party launches can work with less back and forth on systems integration between the satellite being launched and the launch vehicle.
Apropos, youtube gave me a Harbor Freight ad before watching this video :D
I'm confused by this statement in the article:
<< LignoSat is made of honoki, a kind of magnolia tree native to Japan, and has been made using a traditional Japanese technique without screws or glue. >>
From photos I've seen while searching for more information, it does appear that there's a wooden core structure that is joined without fasteners. But it's then given a metal exoskeleton and what certainly appears to be metal fasteners.
I'd like to understand whether the goal is to create satellites without metal, as the article seemed to imply.
It's not, this is all internet click bait sensational stuff. Wood can be an effective composite and has been used in space vehicles for at least 40 years. First time I saw it used was old LV fairings. These days there are much better composites available so the use of wood is likely for non-technical reasons.
This is meant to show that the housing can be made of wood, but the antennae and electronics still require mounting points via metal or plastic fasteners. The article gives a few reasons why this might be valuable, eg fewer toxins released during burnup, but I see this as an experiment in alternative manufacturing techniques, to see what we might be missing when we assume things like this need to be made out of metal and bolts.
>but I see this as an experiment in alternative manufacturing techniques, to see what we might be missing when we assume things like this need to be made out of metal and bolts.
That's an optimistic view, I suspect it's just done to get people talking about it and to contrast the traditional joinery against the technology. There isn't likely to be any criteria by which wood is the best material to use for something like this.
Not just mounting points but a common ground.
i think one goal is to minimize space debris. when metal debris reenters earths atmosphere it evaporates and the metal vapor do bad things. wood is just burning to co2.
I accidentally visited this from a browser with no adblocker and outbrain clickbait has become comically weird. I was shown what appears to be AI generated video clips of a bear walking through a children's hospital ward, presented as a story about something that happened in my area (Ireland has no bears). I refreshed and was shown the same story but this time it was a wolf. This was side by side with the usual midjourney images as dating site profiles, and weird fabricated medical stuff. They really have gone off the deep end.
Outer Wilds was accurate!
Wooden spaceships, helmets, and other contraptions, augmented with metals and… other “spoiler” materials.
To anyone interested in space with a day or two to spare, I highly recommend playing Outer Wilds. It’s very good and unlike any other game (and I can’t explain why without spoiling the magic).
IIRC some Chinese spy sats that still used photographic film to capture images used treated wood for the heat shield of the film return capsule. Not that special actually as IIRC treated cork has been used for spacecraft heat shielding quite regularly.
Even "advanced" heat shields are basically bakelite.
I'm curious what an advanced alien species would think if they saw a wooden satellite. Would they be able to extract the DNA and think that it's something humans created, same as the code on the CPU? Or would they just think the wood is some type of synthetic like fiberglass?
Maybe worth remembering that "trees" have evolved many times on earth. i.e. trees do not all share a common tree-like ancestor. The woody-trunk-and-branches pattern was just useful enough that it evolved many times. Which makes me suspect that aliens would likely have something tree-like on their home world, and would have also learned to build using it.
Here's an article I like about that: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
I wonder if they'd think the wooden ship _was_ the human, a la Species 8472
IMO it's likely that alien life would mirror the life we have here in a lot of ways. It's likely that aliens would have DNA or RNA, and would be made out of cells (unless they've become machines). So I think they would be pretty likely to understand what they are looking at given a bit of time for analysis.
The reason aliens are likely to be made out of DNA and have cells is simply that those things tend to naturally come to exist in our universe. We don't really have any evidence that any other chemistry (e.g. silicon-based) can produce life in this universe. If DNA-based life comes about elsewhere in the universe, it won't look exactly like us, but that life is also likely to have both plants and animals, just because life tends to try to fill every available evolutionary niche.
Why? To ensure that it's biodegradable? I can see the idea of build with wood as a part of colonisation, assuming that we can make trees grow. That would still mean seeding a forest 30 - 50 year (or more), before humans arrive. It seems like it might be faster to start extracting metals, or make some type of concrete. That is especially true if the forest needs human intervention to grow and produce usable timber.
This is assuming said trees could even grow in such a different environment. I'd be surprised of they get far, given that even with the right nutrients and sunlight, there's still the matter of gravitropism for the plant to 'sense' how to grow correctly.
Weight reduction would be a serious benefit if this actually works
How do you sufficiently sterilize wood to protect mars from contamination? I imagine this is less trivial than sterilizing metal, plastic, whatever other materials typically go into space-vehicle production.
I was thinking the same thing, and then I also thought - if the long term plans are colonization, is sterilization and non-contamination viable, or even desirable?
While the missions remain scientific I absolutely agree contamination must be avoided. But as soon as we cross into the colony phase, wouldn’t that restriction just make things harder?
The Polaris Dawn mission took a violin to orbit: https://www.thestrad.com/lutherie/how-do-you-take-a-violin-t...
In addition to vacuum exposure to address outgassing, they'd probably hit wood with some sterilization process (gamma radiation as one example) to ensure any microbes in the wood are dead before landing on another planet.
I'm not sold that it's possible to do any form of colonization without some kind of eventual contamination.
I assume that a combination of high temperature and irradiation should be effective.
Wood should not be damaged by temperatures high enough to kill living cells and it provides negligible shielding for radiation.
However, after sterilization it may require more care than metal, glass or plastic, to avoid any later contamination. Presumably all the assembly must be done in a sterile environment.
Unlike metal or glass, which could be washed in oxidizing acids to remove organic substances, sterilized wood may contain dead bacterial cells in its pores. For satellites expected to burn on reentry that would not matter. For exploring other planets, that would be undesirable, as this could provide false positives for detectors of organic substances.
Any woodworkers know what species of wood was used? 'Hinoki' is a widely used Japanese cypress but the English articles all say it's a 'honoki' magnolia?
It's a magnolia. Magnolia hypoleuca or I think it's also called Japanese large-leaf magnolia.
I've used it for knife handles. It's light and strong, so that makes sense for this use case.
There's precedent for wooden rockety things: the German WW2 Rheintochter, which had plywood control fins. Never went into space, obviously, but we sometimes forget now how useful wood can be.
> This will provide more people with the opportunity to develop amateur satellites at a lower cost.
Maybe, not what is being reported by Sky News though
There may be no air or water in space but there is radiation. Wouldn't that degrade the wood?
Off gassing of volatiles and water would damage the wood too - wood has a lot of oil and other volatiles in it that help hold it together.
Will it crack when all the water etc gets pulled out of it?
By the time this goes into space the water content is likely dictated by the humidity at the launch site.
I'm sure this is kiln dried so the organic volatiles have been mostly driven off.
Wooden spaceships has been part of some science fiction stories.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/250692/disgusting-...
Stage trees if I recall were the subject of a series of science fiction stories. They grew as boosters essentially, ignited at some point to launch and spread their seeds. If they grew for a long time without igniting, they might leave the planet.
'The Integral Trees' also had trees in space.
The unlikeliness of the wooden spaceship was one of my favorite parts of the sci-fi mystery/adventure game “The Outer Wilds”. (An indie gem…highly recommended, if you like puzzles or exploration.)
The original concept for Alien 3 had the prison being a wooden space monastery.
See also: Yggdrasill the tree-ship from Hyperion, and a similar idea from the movie The Fountain.