Abstract
The tools of interstellar flight are, one by one, being defined. They are hardly ready to fly over such distances, but even in the case of propulsion, the most intractable problem of all, solutions are being suggested and ideas tested out in laboratories. If our goal is to build a robotic interstellar probe that can deliver a payload to the nearest star and return data from it, then the evidence of our first fifty years of space exploration is that a 4.3-light-year journey is no longer out of the question. The solar sail technology that will probably be our first interstellar propulsion system is one of breathtaking elegance. It will take us to the stars on a beam of light.
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Notes
“a space voyage of some forty years.”—Smith’s “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” first appeared in the April 1960 issue of Galaxy.
“finally fluttered out among the stars.”— Smith’s fiction has always been hard to gather in one place, but it is now available in The Re-Discovery of Man: The Complete Short Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (Framingham, Mass.: NESFA Press, 1993), 671 pages. The book’s cover shows a three-sail interstellar spacecraft as envisioned by science fiction artist Jack Gaughan.
“religious themes and allegories into much of his fiction.”—Linebarger left an equally impressive list of nonfiction works, including the privately printed Gospel of Sun Chung Shan (Paris, 1932), The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat Sen: An Exposition of the San Min Chu (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937), The China of Chiang K’ai-shek: A Political Study (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1941), and Psychological Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Infantry Journal Press, 1948). Under the name Carmichael Smith, he wrote a highly regarded suspense novel called Atomsk (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949).
“speeds high enough to reach the nearest stars.”—A key study in this period was Forward’s “Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails,” Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 21 (1984), pp. 187–95, but as we’ll see, Forward’s work was in constant transition as he injected new ideas into the mix.
“confused its navigation sensors.”—Donna Shirley, later manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars exploration program, saw Mariner 10 from the inside as a mission analyst. She tells its story in her book Managing Martians (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).
“judicious tilting of the spacecraft solar panels.”—“Mariner Venus/Mercury 1973 Status Bulletin #21,” March 15,1974, Mariner Venus/Mercury 1973 Project Office.
“dependent upon scientific theory and calculations.”— Roger Bozzetto discusses the Somnium as the first known example of hard science fiction in “Kepler’s Somnium, or, Science Fiction’s Missing Link,” in Science Fiction Studies #52, vol. 17, part 3 (November 199o).
“an appendix stuffed with astronomical calculations.”—The standard edition is Edward Rosen’s Kepler’s Somnium (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
: “you Galileo, for Jupiter.” —As quoted in Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight (New York: Basic Books, z000), p. 6. Also see Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1960), p. 195.
: “Les mondes stellaires (Stellar Worlds)”—Frederick Ordway III writes charmingly about Aventures and other early French science fiction works in his “Visions of the Moon: A Collector’s Tale,” which appeared in the November-December zoos issue of Ad Astra.
: “Kepler’s thesis about the displacement of comet’s tails.” —A good discussion of Lebedev’s work is by Vassilis Lembessis, “P. N. Lebedev and Light Radiation Pressure,” in Europhysics News, vol. 32, no. 1, 2001.
“as it rushed past the sun.” —Freeman Dyson, who draws frequently from Bernal in books like Disturbing the Universe (1979) and Infinite in All Directions (1988), wrote a wonderful essay exploring Bernal’s contributions that was originally presented as a lecture in Bernal’s honor at Birkbeck College, London. The printed version can now be found as an appendix in Carl Sagan, ed., Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1975).
“designed to seed ideas among future authors.”—Carl Wiley, “Clipper Ships of Space,” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1951, pp. 135ff.
“the beginning of modern work on the sail concept.”— Richard Garwin, “Solar Sailing: A Practical Method of Propulsion within the Solar System,” Jet Propulsion z8 (March 1958): 188–9o.
“one of the core articles in the field of interstellar studies.”—“Solar Sail Starships: The Clipper Ships of the Galaxy” appeared in Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 34 (1981), pp. 371–80.
“pushed by the pressure of light beams.” —Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes (New York: Random House, 2000).
“the DLR German Aerospace Centre in Cologne.”—“Solar Sails for Space Exploration—The Development and Demonstration of Critical Technologies in Partnership,” ESA Bulletin 98 (June 1999).
“the difficulties of deploying the latter.” —Wright Friedman et al., “Solar Sailing: The Concept Made Realistic,” American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Aerospace Sciences Meeting, Huntsville, Ala., Jan. 16–18, 1978. AIAA paper 78–82.
“that would have been unrolled individually.”—The heliogyro concept evolved from work by Richard MacNeal at the Astro Research Corporation and John Hedgepath in the mid-196os.
: “not ready for that rendezvous,”—See Friedman’s Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel for an overview of this project (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1988).
“a promising one.”— Interview with Humphrey Price at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, January 31, 2003.
“we have to be circumspect.”—Telephone interview with Moktar Salama, April 4, 2003.
: “missions outside the solar system.”—Salama’s recent laboratory work is discussed in his article “Ground Demonstration of a Spinning Solar Sail Deployment Concept,” Journal of Spacecraft d Rockets 40, no. 1 (January 2oo3): 9–14.
“NASA flight validation mission.”— See David M. Murphy and Paul A. Gierow, “Scalable Solar Sail Subsystem Design Considerations,” presented at the 43rd Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference in Denver, Colo. in April 2002. Available online at http: //www. aec-able. com/corpinfo/Resources/zooz-17o3-Murphy.pdf.
“a 1945 article in the magazine Wireless World.” —“Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?” Wireless World, October 1945.
: “satellite television and communications platforms.”—A true geostationary orbit puts the satellite directly over the equator, allowing it to remain stationary with respect to the ground observer, which is why these satellites are so useful for telecommunications and weather purposes.
“while the Earth spins around underneath it.”—Robert Forward, Indistinguishable from Magic (New York: Baen Books, 1995), 90.
“impart thrust to a sail.”—Benford’s paper on the experiment is “Microwave Beam-Driven Propulsion Experiments for High-Speed Space Exploration,” presented at the EuroEM 2000 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Myrabo’s paper is “Experimental Investigation of Laser-Pushed Light Sails in a Vacuum,” presented in 2000 at the Advanced Propulsion Conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“candidates for spaceflight”—“Sail Technology Beamed to Future Space Exploration,” press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Media Relations Office, July 5, 2000.
“I call my stories `proposals.”’—Phone conversation with James Benford, February 19, 2003.
: “2,00o degrees Celsius in practical materials.”—Ibid.
“in a paper detailing the experiment.”—James Benford, “Flight and Spin of Microwave-Driven Sails: First Experiments,” Proceedings Pulsed Power Plasma Science 2001, IEEE o1CH37251, p. 548.
“1,331 years.”—Gregory Matloff, “The Perforated Solar Sail: Its Application to Interstellar Travel,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 56 (2003): 255–61.
“they’ll take time to solve.” —Interview with Les Johnson at Marshall Space Flight Center, July 3o, 2003.
“The flies can come through but you can’t.”—Benford phone conversation, February 19, 2003.
“assisted by other mechanical means.”—Gregory Benford et al., “Sail Deployment by Microwave Beam Experiments and Simulations,” available online at http://www.physics.uci.edu/faculty/Sail_Dev_By_Mic_Beam.html. p.120: “a pack of cigarettes.”—Greg Clark, “Breakthrough in Solar Sail Technology,” space.com, March 2, 2000.
“(some 30 million kilometers… well inside the orbit of Mercury).”—Charles E. Garner et al., “Lightweight Solar Sail for a Spacecraft Flying Near the Sun,” NASA Tech Brief vol. 26, no. 10, from JPL Technology Report NPO-20854.
“loo to 200 kilometers per second.”—Price interview, January 31, 2003.
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Gilster, P. (2004). Journey by Starlight: The Story of the Solar Sail. In: Centauri Dreams. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3894-0_5
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