How to Resurrect a 35-Year-Old Spacecraft, Popular Mechanics
“Wingo and Cowing started a RocketHub crowdfunding effort to raise $125,000 for the mission. They’ve also been hunting for the right parts to get the communications systems back online. “I was Dumpster diving at a storage unit with Bob Farquhar last week, pulling stuff out of boxes, and I FedExed a $200 overnight box to California,” Cowing says. And like they did with the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, they’ve been able to tap in to the expertise of the original mission specialists, as well as a robust online community that seems quite adept at making the right documents appear when they’re needed. That network includes Farquhar, now 81 years old, who kept a lot of the documentation from the original ISEE-3 mission. “He foresaw this day.” Wingo says. “This is not just happenstance that this spacecraft is coming back in 2014. They actually planned for this in the 1980s.”