Word: spacecrafts
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Your article on plans for a solar-sail vehicle, the world's first spacecraft to fly powered by direct solar radiation [SCIENCE, March 5], noted that the idea goes back many years but failed to mention the contribution of science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Back in 1964, he published a short story about an international race to the moon via "sun yacht." In The Wind from the Sun, Clarke detailed the competitors' various sail designs and their resultant difficulties in tacking to keep the sails facing the sun while making one orbit around the earth to gain escape velocity...
...long voyage of the space station Mir will end Friday, when the spacecraft's controllers in Russia bring it down to its final resting place on earth. Mir, which has already passed the "point of no return" for its final descent, served as an inspiration for many who saw it as the first step towards colonizing space. But there was no choice: after crashing into one too many Soyuz capsules, the craft was suffering from repeated electronic failures. Another loss of radio contact with Mir could have sent the craft into "uncontrolled descent." (Read "New York...
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...
...spacecraft is a 3-ft. metal pod with eight 35-ft. metallic wings. Mylar petals sprout from it--though the prototype used in the April launch will have just two petals. Mounted atop a reconfigured Russian ICBM and launched from a sub in the Barents Sea, the Cosmos 1 will fly to an altitude of 260 miles, where it will deploy the wings and float for a minute or so. If all goes well, the wings will then be jettisoned and the sphere aerobraked back to Earth, its bounce-down on Russian soil cushioned by air bags...