An interesting twist on the idea, beloved by science fiction readers for the last fifty years, of using a solar sail for space travel. And it just might work, too.
An interesting twist on the idea, beloved by science fiction readers for the last fifty years, of using a solar sail for space travel. And it just might work, too.
Using solar sails is a neat concept, but as far as I can figure, you can only use one to speed up. Once you get moving, it’s impossible to use a sail to slow down. Even if you could slow down, a return journey would be impossible using the sail. It’s basically a one-way ticket away from the sun.
You’d think so, but apparently the math disagrees. I’m not sure how that works, but it may have something to do with changing part of the sail into a reflector, as described in Robert Forward’s “Flight of the Dragonfly”.
I’ve read a couple other science fiction stories that employed them too. The Mote in God’s Eye is a famous one, it’s used as a brake by the “Moaties” traveling into our solar system. Michael McCollum’s The Sails of Tau Ceti is interesting as well, though I can’t agree with the way he describe using it as a weapon… according to him, a light-sail cutting off the sunlight to Earth would cause it to snow in Florida, during the summer, within hours. Days or weeks I’d agree with, but hours just doesn’t seem feasible. (I may have some of the details wrong, I only read it once, many years ago.) But he may have been employing hyperbole for the sake of the story, it is a major plot point.