According to an announcement this month by Kyoto University and Sumitomo Forestry, organizations whose shared roots date back 550 years, we may have wooden satellites in a few years.
Wood’s place in high tech has a long track record. During World War II, wooden boats were used for minesweepers, the Spruce Goose was designed to bypass material restrictions during the war, and the plywood-built De Havilland Mosquito in Great Britain had a very low radar cross section. In this century, a man in Bosnia even built an oak Volkswagen Beetle.
The newly announced space project, led by retired astronaut and engineer Prof. Takao Doi, plans to launch satellites built from wood to reduce space debris and hazardous materials from reentry. We are somewhat skeptical about the angle of hazardous materials (and we are not alone in this), but certainly as a way to help ensure complete combustion upon return, wood is an interesting material. It also achieves a great strength to weight ratio, and as a renewable resource, it is easy to find.
Prof Doi has been researching the use of wood in space for years. In 2017, he began fundamental research into the usability of wood in space (page 16), where his team experimented with coniferous (cedar and cypress) and hardwood (satinwood, magnolia and zelkova) trees in vacuum environments. Based on successes, they predicted the launch of wooden satellites in the mid-2020s (their announcement this month said 2023). Sumitomo’s engineers have not released what wood (s) will eventually be used on the satellite.
You may remember astronaut Doi from an experiment onboard the ISS, where he successfully demonstrated flying a boomerang in space (video below), and he also discovered two supernovae in his spare time. We wish him the best of luck.