Hi everyone it's Matt Kaplan host of Planetary Radio back with another

planetary radio extra online-only edition

special extended conversations this time looking at a project that is near and dear to all of us at the Planetary

Society and apparently to many of you it's Light Sale so we have the two best

people on staff to talk to about that. Bruce Betts, you know and love, the Planetary

Society's director of science and technology, as such he works on all of our

projects, monitors them, contributes to them, and that includes the Light Sale

Project which he's quite involved with. Bruce, welcome. Thank you. Joining him is

Jason Davis, digital editor at the Society who we go to for stuff related to

human and commercial spaceflight, but Jason is also our embedded reporter as we have said in the past in the light sale project so they come

out this from two different angles and it'll be great to have both of their viewpoints.

Jason welcome also to you.

Hello Matt, good to be back. Bruce, give us just an overview, first of all, for those people who've only just emerged

from a cave and aren't aware of LightSail or its successes so far?

I have questions for the people who came out of caves, but that's a different show.

Different show.

Different show.

So Light Sale is a Planetary Society project, and it is all about solar sailing.

So using the pressure of light as a spacecraft propulsion method, light's pushing on us all the time. It's just a little tiny push so normally we don't

notice it at all, but if you put a big reflective Mylar sail or something similar in orbit with a small

spacecraft,

then the light push actually become significant.

...