Charles Pooley Lectures on Microlaunchers at AIAA Meeting

Charles Pooley gave a lecture on his Microlaunchers program at the Antelope Valley Section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) on 25 September 2007. Below is the text of the announcement about the talk sent by Nalin A. Ratnayake of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and Section Chairman of AIAA Antelope Valley.

Figure 1. Charles Pooley spoke about Microlaunchers at the 2006 Citizen Science Conference. Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.


Microlaunchers: The Case for Very Small Spacecraft

Presently the business of space exploration is characterized by very large, expensive systems in which there is limited opportunity for participation by more than a few. Even the recent entrepreneurial efforts tend to involve investments on the order of tens to a hundred million dollars.

Launches are so infrequent that there is little opportunity to increase the scale of involvement.

Drawing on the history of computers of "The Mainframe Era" and what suddenly happened in the 1970's, Pooley describes a pathway that could in a manner analogous to that of the advent of the microcomputer lower the cost of entry by development of tiny frequently launched vehicles and spacecraft.

Microlaunchers is intended to create an evolutionary pathway that can stimulate new industries and involvement of a much wider population than now possible.


About Charles Pooley

Charles Pooley is self employed as a consultant and designer with forty years experience in electronics and electrooptics. His background ranges from two years at sea on an oceanographic ship, involvement in startups, patents, to the design of a sounding rocket.

As president of Pacific Rocket Society he designed and with a small group tested the propulsion for a sounding rocket. Presently located in Mojave, California, he is involved with the startup Microlaunchers.

For the past ten years he has been studying issues involved in space entrepreneurism, and the impediments to its development.