Word: solarity
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...action hero has set up residence. Major space on the lot was given to Croft Manor, a Victorian mansion decorated with grand staircases, stained-glass windows and prehistoric pottery. In one corner, there's a glass-walled computer room filled with a dozen flat, plasma screens that monitor the solar system. Beside them sits an evil-looking robotic biped that serves alternately as sophisticated jukebox and lethal assassin...
...action hero has set up residence. Major space on the lot was given to Croft Manor, a Victorian mansion decorated with grand staircases, stained-glass windows and prehistoric pottery. In one corner, there's a glass-walled computer room filled with a dozen flat, plasma screens that monitor the solar system. Beside them sits an evil-looking robotic biped that serves alternately as sophisticated jukebox and lethal assassin...
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...
NASA has a keen interest in solar sailing and has budgeted $5 million to investigate 17 possible missions. It may select one as early as next month. But while the space agency has been mulling plans, the people behind the new ship, dubbed Cosmos 1, have been getting set to fly. The project is the brainchild of Russia's Babakin Space Center, near Moscow, and the Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif., a think tank founded in 1979 by astronomer Carl Sagan and others. The two groups had long been developing plans for a solar-sail mission but got the cash...