For 17 years, it has been drifting on a lonely course through space. Launched during the disco era and shuttered by Nasa in 1997, the space-craft is now returning to the civilization that abandoned it.
It seemed destined to pass without fanfare, except for a slight chance of slamming into the moon, and then loop aimlessly through the inner solar system. But now, a shoestring group of civilians headquartered in a decommissioned McDonald’s have reached out and made contact with it – a long-distance handshake that was the first step toward snaring it back into Earth’s orbit.
The zombie spaceship is coming home. After 36 years in space, the craft, the International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, appears to be in good working order. The main challenge, engineers say, is figuring out how to command it. No one has the full operating manual anymore.
“We call ourselves techno-archaeologists,” said Dennis Wingo, an engineer and entrepreneur who has a track record of extracting miracles from space antiques Nasa has given up on. Wingo’s company, Skycorp, has its offices in the McDonald’s that served the navy’s Moffett air station, 15 minutes northwest of San Jose, Calif. After the base closed, Nasa converted it to a research campus for small technology firms, academia and nonprofits.
Wingo took on the project as if it were a stray puppy. “No one else was going to do it,” he said, “and it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Nasa launched ISEE-3 in 1978 and the agency used it for various missions before retiring it in 1997.
Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing decided ISEE-3 was another worthy effort.
About 20 others scattered around the country joined the effort, including many members of the original ISEE-3 team.On RocketHub, a crowdfunding site, they collected nearly $160,000, from 2,238 donors. Mr. Wingo has now persuaded NASA to use the Deep Space Network to pinpoint ISEE-3’s trajectory, to calculate the rocket burn required to put it on a path to Earth orbit.
