There has been a long road of innovation to get to modern-day space exploration with rocketships and satellites. An ancient Alexandrian astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer, Claudius Ptolemy, developed a geocentric cosmology called the Ptolemaic system around 150 AD. Ptolemy wasn’t the first to introduce the world to the concept of geocentrism, the belief that the Earth is the unmoving, stationary center of the universe and all other heavenly bodies orbit around it.
Ancient Greeks had already believed in geocentrism for hundreds of years, and some, like Aristotle, had devised complex geocentric models to further explain the workings of our universe. Still, Ptolemy’s model became the most widely accepted cosmological belief. It stayed as such well over a thousand years later — thanks in no small part to the Roman Catholic Church’s religious and legal support of a geocentric model.
Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus would flip astronomy on its head in 1543 by introducing the scientific world to the Copernican system.
It was a heliocentric cosmology based on the belief that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the universe and what the planets orbit.
Opposition from geocentrists like the church and other powerful cohorts was plentiful, and Copernicus’ system was far from perfect. However, it was impossible to prevent it from spreading throughout the astronomy field. Before long, top contemporary astronomers and mathematicians worldwide were in the midst of a heliocentric revolution, as the belief offered more tangible evidence and realistic explanations for our solar system than Ptolemy’s model.
Graphic Courtesy picryl, The solar system according to Nicolaus Copernicus in the Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius.
These new theories and advancements could not be stopped in scientific circles, but the Roman Catholic Church could suppress them in a different way: the legal system. Italian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician Galileo Galilei was put on trial in 1633 by the Roman Inquisition for heresy against the church after developing models and beliefs based on the Copernican system.
One of Galileo’s most significant contributions (and therefore a major charge against him) was seemingly innocuous. By making improvements to the telescope, which had only existed since 1608, he made previously impossible planetary observations, which were used to basically prove the Copernican heliocentric system. Galileo was found guilty and put under house arrest for the remainder of his life, eventually dying in 1642.
The period from 1543 to 1642 — starting with the publishing of the Copernican system and ending with the death of Galileo — spans 99 years, capturing the beginning of a movement that would spark one of the most radical shifts in the history of scientific belief, one that would literally change how humans understand and view the universe itself.
On the other hand, a span of 99 years, starting in 1903, would begin with the first successful airplane flight and end in 2002, with thousands of planes dominating the air and spacecraft above those!
The difference in those two near-century periods is not meant to show that one was more impactful than the other but merely to highlight the speed at which innovation and technologies advance. This rapid progress and technological advancement only exists because of the scientific theories and beliefs that came before — the ones that others, like Galileo, were persecuted for believing.
Photo Courtesy Darkmoom_Art
It’s easy to imagine that Galileo, Copernicus, Ptolemy, and Aristotle would all be amazed, confused, and probably alarmed when seeing spaceships and satellites for the first time. It’s also fair to assume that the concept of flying into space aside, aluminum, the material that makes up most of the ships and rockets, might be just as surprising to them — the metal wasn’t discovered until 1825.
Unlike aluminum, those famous astronomers definitely knew about wood, making it all the more shocking that a group of Japanese scientists have developed and sent a wooden satellite into space for testing at the International Space Station (ISS).
There’s a finite but almost limitless number of reasons that explain how humans have created technologies capable of sending humans to explore other planets (and get back to Earth safely), yet they all fit under the all-encompassing concept put best by a different famous scientist, Sir Issac Newton.
In a letter to Robert Hooke, the guy you might remember from science class for discovering the cell, Newton famously wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” He was artfully describing that scientific discoveries are not purely individual moments of brilliance or “Eureka!” They’re like the sprint races in the Tour De France, where an entire team spends the race fighting the wind and perfectly positioning its sprinter for a final dash to the finish line.
A wooden cube with 4-inch-long sides, the LignoSat looks nothing like a stereotypical satellite. In fact, its design seems like one you’d find in a sketchbook of old prototypes for the first satellite, Sputnik 1, from 1957.
The concept for the LignoSat came in the form of a question from a Japanese engineer, former NASA astronaut, and special professor at Kyoto University named Takao Doi — “Could a human society living in space grow trees as renewable building material?” Doi’s search for answers brought him back to those aforementioned giants, namely the Wright brothers, who built the first working airplanes with — you guessed it — wood.
When Doi mentioned the wooden airplanes to Koji Murata, a professor of forest and biomaterials science at Kyoto University, Murata commented on building satellites from wood. Not long after, the vague concept turned into a fully realized project, and a group of scientists from Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry were soon testing which types of wood would perform best in space. In 2022, they sent birch, cherry, and magnolia wood samples to the International Space Station (ISS) for testing.
Photo Courtesy Kyoto University
Nearly eight months of exposure to cosmic rays, solar particles, and extreme temperatures later, researchers were able to determine that all three samples were crack, decomposition, and warp-free. Magnolia was selected as the wood of choice for its lightweight and crack-resistant properties.
The team then recruited two master carpenters adept in the ancient Japanese “sashimono” woodworking technique to construct the wooden satellites. Instead of using glue or nails, sashimono uses complex joints and intricate angles to create furniture, or in this case, satellites.
The LignoSat, which does incorporate a few plastic and silicon parts, was officially launched into space aboard an unmanned SpaceX rocket from Florida in early November.
Once it reaches the ISS, the satellite will go on a six-month orbital mission meant to collect data on how it performs in space.
If the mission is successful, wooden satellites could quickly replace metal-based ones, which are known to release environmentally harmful metallic particles like aluminum oxides when reentering the atmosphere. Swapping the thousands of metal satellites floating in space with wood might come across as whimsical, but it is definitely possible.
“I used to think it was impossible to send anything made of wood to space,” Murata said in an interview with the New York Times. It will be interesting to see what other “impossible” space feats become a reality.
