Word: sailship
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...atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other gear to report home for new instructions. They could also reproduce themselves and their ships in order to send off a new set of explorer robots...
Gentle, indeed. Scientists estimate that photons of sunlight falling on an area the size of a football field exert a pressure equal to the weight of a marble. Yet in the vacuum of space this tiny force is sufficient to accelerate the sailship...
...concept of a space sailing race first surfaced in Arthur C. Clarke's 1963 story The Wind from the Sun, about a seven-craft regatta to the moon. And in the mid-1970s, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena actually designed a sophisticated sailship to rendezvous with Halley's comet, but a NASA budget squeeze killed the project...
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