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Paris, 22nd March 2022. Gama, a French aerospace company, announces it has raised 2 million euros with the French Public Investment Bank (BPI), the French Space Agency (CNES) and leading international angel investors to deploy a solar sail in space and revolutionize space transportation.
A solar sail allows a spacecraft to be powered solely by sunlight. This new propulsion technology enables speeds never reached before to explore our Solar System and beyond.
This first round of funding will finance a demonstration mission: the deployment of a 73.3m2 solar sail from a satellite launched by SpaceX at 550km altitude. Other missions will follow.
Sailing effortlessly through space has long been in the dreams of many. Kepler first theorized the possibility in a 1608 letter to Galilei, and the idea of propelling a spacecraft solely by the action of the Sun was further developed in the 1970s. Louis de Gouyon Matignon and Thibaud Elziere met in 2020 to turn the concept into reality.
"In 1999, I wrote my school thesis on solar sails in partnership with French Space Agency (CNES) researchers. Since then, the passion has never left me and I had only one obsession, to go from theory to practice. In 2020, I contacted a research group in France, the U3P (Union pour la Promotion de la Propulsion Photonique), who put me in touch with Louis, a young entrepreneur with the same dream" says Thibaud Elziere, Gama co-founder.
Andrew Nutter, a space enthusiast and investor in numerous technology companies, quickly joined as the third co-founder. Today, in addition to the three founders, Gama has a team of a dozen engineers working to develop the sail and the software to control it.
Solar sails rely on photonic propulsion. This form of propulsion uses the pressure produced by photons when they bounce off a reflective surface. This force is weak, but when applied to large surfaces, can induce non-negligible effects.
"In the void of space, with no air friction, a continuous force (even a small one) applied to a spacecraft induces a constant acceleration and continuously increases its speed" says Jordan Culeux, technically leading the first mission.
A solar sail could theoretically accelerate to 20% of the speed of light. Similar to maritime sailing, it is the position of the sail in relation to the Sun’s rays that will determine the trajectory of the craft. As with a conventional sail, it is therefore possible to move away from the Sun but also to get closer by sailing “upwind”.
Unlike conventional chemical or electric propulsion systems that need to carry fuel, photonic propulsion draws energy purely from the Sun. Spacecraft using this form of propulsion are thus less massive and can be accelerated continuously with a virtually infinite source of energy. This enables missions to reach more distant objectives at significantly lower cost. These characteristics make it possible to envisage new commercial or scientific missions to explore and even exploit resources in our Solar System.
“This is an emerging technology and there have only been a handful of successful solar sail projects so far. It is attracting the interest of the major space agencies and we are aware that NASA and JAXA (the Japanese Space Agency) are working on similar projects”, says Louis de Gouyon Matignon, Gama co-founder.