Word: sails
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...every ancient mariner knew, traveling by sail is a simple way to go. Though the winds could be fickle and the boats pokey, the energy source that moved the ship was free, plentiful and renewable. Now the same technology that conquered the oceans of Earth may conquer the ocean of space...
This week a Russian and American consortium will announce plans for an April launch of the first so-called solar-sail vehicle, a multimasted spacecraft that will use sunlight to push itself along. To a public raised on smoke-and-fire rocketry, the idea of drawing energy straight from space seems fanciful. To the people behind the new ship, however, the technology is not only sensible but inevitable, the easiest way to reinvent the business of cosmic travel. "This allows us to use very little fuel to fly very great distances," says Bud Schurmeier, a former NASA engineer...
...idea behind solar sailing is simple. Although light is made of massless particles called photons, such ephemeral things exert real pressure, especially when they flow from so close a source as the sun. Attach a sail of lightweight Mylar or other material to a spacecraft, set it up in the path of that outrushing energy, and you ought to be able to move in almost any direction...
...pull it to my chest. What's more, the sub has two steering wheels. A sailor to my left moved horizontal planes at the back of the boat that could cause it to dive or ascend. My wheel controlled the stern rudder and the horizontal fins at the sail (the sub's giant hump near its front). Experienced drivers knew how to work together. I didn...
...pull it to my chest. What's more, the sub has two steering wheels. A sailor to my left moved horizontal planes at the back of the boat that could cause it to dive or ascend. My wheel controlled the stern rudder and the horizontal fins at the sail (the sub's giant hump near its front). Experienced drivers knew how to work together. I didn...