Word: sailship
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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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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