World's First Wooden Satellite To Launch This Year

The world's first wooden satellite is on the way, in the shape of the Finnish WISA Woodsat.

ESA (European Space Agency) materials experts are contributing a suite of experimental sensors to the mission as well as helping with pre-flight testing.

Woodsat is due to launch before the end of this year, says ESA.

WISA Woodsat is a 10x10x10 cm 'CubeSat' - a type of nanosatellite built up from standardised boxes - but with surface panels made from plywood. Woodsat's only non-wooden external parts are corner aluminium rails used for its deployment into space plus a metal selfie stick.

The mission was initiated by Jari Makinen, Finnish writer and broadcaster. He co-founded a company called Arctic Astronautics, which markets fully functional replicas of orbit-ready CubeSats for education, training and hobby purposes.

"I've always enjoyed making model planes, involving a lot of wooden parts. Having worked in the space education field, this got me wondering; why don't we fly any wooden materials in space?

"So I had the idea first of all to fly a wooden satellite up to the stratosphere, aboard a weather balloon. That happened in 2017, with a wooden version of KitSat. That having gone well, we decided to upgrade it and actually go into orbit. From there the project just snowballed: we found commercial backing, and secured a berth on an Electron launcher from Rocket Lab in New Zealand."