WASHINGTON -- NASA engineers are lending their expertise to a commercial effort to send a solar sail-powered spacecraft on a journey around the Earth and beyond.

Houston-based Team Encounter LLC aims to be the first company to harness the solar wind to propel an unmanned spacecraft to the outer edge of the solar system.

Tens of thousands of people around the world already have paid the company $25 to $75 apiece to send their digitized personal greetings and DNA along for the ride.

Although the company’s original 2001 launch date has come and gone, Team Encounter has tried to keep its customer base happy by communicating the risks involved in the project.

The company also issues frequent mission status updates and periodically beams the digitized messages of its customers into deep space via a powerful radio astronomy antenna in the Ukraine.

The next so-called Cosmic Call, planned for May 30, will broadcast over 120,000 messages into space.

Now, with a mid-2005 target launch date for a demonstration mission in Earth orbit, Team Encounter has enlisted the help of structures and materials engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.

Team Encounter and Langley signed a memorandum of agreement April 17 that will give the Houston-based firm ready access to some of NASA’s best experts in lightweight spacecraft design.

Greg Manuel, the space structures leader in Langley’s Earth and Space Science Program Office, said no money changes hands under the agreement, but the in-kind agreement is expected to be mutually beneficial to all involved.

"It’s a sharing of knowledge," Manuel said. "We are benefiting from finding out what they are doing and they are benefiting from picking our brains to find out if their design is technically sound."

Team Encounter President Charlie Chafer said the agreement is a tremendous boon to the company.

"What’s valuable to us is we are going to get access to state of the art facilities and state of the art people to work on testing of the Earthview solar sail at no cost to us," Chafer said in a telephone interview.

Team Encounter’s solar sail program has already attracted the interest of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA paid Team Encounter $50,000 last year for details of its spacecraft design and agreed in March to pay the company an additional $50,000 to investigate whether its solar sail demonstrator could be launched into a polar orbit of interest to meteorologists and other weather researchers.

Chafer said Team Encounter is on track to complete its evaluation in June of the feasibility of launching the solar sail craft into an unusual orbit that would provide continual coverage of either the North or South pole.

Team Encounter plans to launch their spacecraft as a secondary payload on an Ariane 5 rocket.

So far, the company has turned up no showstoppers and anticipates additional contracts from NOAA this year.

Hardware has already been built and tested. Although some components are being redesigned, Chafer said he still expects the Earthview demonstrator to be built and launched for $25 million or less.

Team Encounter is now targeting a mid-2005 launch -- a half a year later than what the company was shooting for as recently as March. Chafer, however, is taking the schedule slips in stride.

"You can’t invent according to a schedule," he said. "We’ve said all along we will fly when we are ready."

Chafer said the company is shooting for a March 2004 critical design review and launch readiness about a year after that. Team Encounter expects to launch a larger interstellar solar sail craft about 20 months after Earthview’s debut.

Comments: bberger@hq.space.com