French aerospace company Gama raises $2M to develop a solar sail spacecraft

One day, solar radiation might be able to propel a craft between the stars, just as sea breezes propel sailboats across the sea on Earth. The hope of the French startup is at least that.

The goal of the company is to develop a low-cost solar sail that would use light as a means of propulsion. The French Public Investment Bank, the French Space Agency, and angel investors gave $2 million to demonstrate the technology in space. A 789-square-foot solar sail will deploy at an altitude of 322 miles after a CubeSat is launched on a Falcon 9 rocket.

We can test a lot of things on Earth, but only in the zero gravity of space. The sail should be about 10 meters across.

Solar sails are not new. In a letter to Galileo Galilei in 1608 Johannes Kepler mused about them. The first successful deployment of a solar sail was in 2010 by the IKAROS space yacht. The space advocacy group Planetary Society launched LightSail 2 in 2019.

Multiple organizations are working on new solar sail missions. NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) will have an 800- square-foot solar sail designed by Illinois-based NanoAvionics. The $100 million in funding for the Breakthrough Starshot mission will be used to send a fleet of hundreds of tiny solar sail-powered spacecraft to the star system Alpha Centauri.

First, the team at Gama strives to move extremely fast, and second, we are different from previous and current missions. This allows us to save on structural weight.

Ahead of its first launch, the company is already designing its second mission, one that will deploy at higher altitude and demonstrate we can steer the sail and provide a reliable low-cost alternative to traditional propulsion technologies.

Unlike traditional sails, solar sails use a photon to propel themselves, instead of the air molecule that makes up the wind. The solar sail made of Mylar or a polyamide can be used to propel a spaceship because they don't have mass. The force is small, but it can add up quickly. It is possible that a solar sail could propel a craft to 20% of the speed of light.

It would be possible to eliminate the amount of propellant that is needed to carry, freeing up mass for other uses. Since the vehicle could theoretically be propelled indefinitely, using solar sails could prolong the mission duration. This would be crucial for long-duration deep-space missions, which explains why there is an interest in developing the technology further.