Re:Solar sail (1980)
by abecedarius on Sunday June 17, 2018 @11:09AM
(#17332677)
Drexler's master's thesis has more detail: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/16234
and pp 7-9 of http://space.nss.org/media/L5-News-1979-05.pdf summarize. I don't know what's been done more recently about space-built sails (or other uses of big, light mirrors).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Solar sail (1980)
by greglindahl on Sunday June 17, 2018 @11:53AM
(#17332881)
Japan has operated a solar sail near the orbit of Venus, several countries and companies are running experiments on using them to make satellites deorbit faster, the Planetary Society is launching Lightsail-2 on the next Falcon Heavy, and the Breakthrough Starshot hopes to make scifi a reality and shine a huge laser on tiny chip-scale spaceships to send them to Alpha Centauri.
The field has been active.
Re:Solar sail (1980)
by abecedarius on Sunday June 17, 2018 @08:07PM
(#17335081)
It's great to see progress -- I just meant I'm curious about building the sails in space for higher performance, and haven't heard about anyone else trying to refine those ideas.