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Wood-Panelled LignoSat Launched
Diminutive LignoSat has been launched into space, testing among other things the use of wood as a renewable building material for space exploration.
(The tiny wood-panelled, solar-powered satellite will orbit Earth for six months)
The world's first wood-panelled satellite has been launched into space to test the suitability of timber as a renewable building material in future exploration of destinations like the Moon and Mars.Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth.
Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue.
This is just the start. In his award-winning 1989 novel Hyperion, Dan Simmons describes titanic treeships that are grown to move between the stars:
The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-long treeship as he closed for rendezvous, the treeship's details blurred by the redundant machine and erg-generated containment fields which surrounded it like a spherical mist, but its leafy bulk clearly ablaze with thousands of lights which shone softly through leaves and thin-walled environment pods, or along countless platforms, bridges command decks, stairways and bowers. Around the base of the treeship, engineering and cargo spheres clustered like oversized galls while blue and violet streamers trailed behind like ten kilometer-long roots...
(Read more about treeships)
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