You can make all sorts of cool things out of wood.
We’ve featured wooden watches, wooden sunglasses and wood which is Zen.
But we never expected to feature wooden satellites from Japan.
Why Wooden Satellites?
There is something of an issue outside of the earth’s atmosphere. The space nearest the planet is full of man made junk.
Rockets, satellites, boosters, and other bits of stellar technology all float endlessly – until they either fall to earth or hit something else, often something important and ruin it.
By building wooden satellites, the Sumitomo Forestry company has created satellites which can fall to earth safely because they are guaranteed to burn up on re-entry, this means – no additional space junk.
A Clean Burn
And unlike metal objects, which sometimes burn up on reentry too, these satellites burn clean and don’t create the same toxic dust that may eventually contribute to global warming or even poison the planet directly.
It seems that wooden satellites are the sustainable future of near space exploration.
Well done, Sumitomo.