Sail Concepts

Hybrid propulsion technologies have emerged naturally as we look at ways to reach the stars. They’re the result of trying to extract maximum performance from each option, and it sometimes turns out that putting two ideas together works better than either by itself. Next week we’ll be looking at one such concept, A. A. Jackson’s [...]

I’ve been thinking about solar sails these past few days, a topic that inevitably invokes Arthur Holly Compton, who first demonstrated that x-rays have particle-like properties. Compton’s experiments in 1923 produced a body of work for which he would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics later that decade. Thanks to him we learned that while [...]

You wouldn’t think that slowing down a starship would be the subject of a totally engrossing novel, but that’s the plot device in Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970, though based on a 1967 short story called “To Outlive Eternity”). Anderson’s ramscoop starship, the Leonora Christine, can’t slow down because of damage suffered in mid-cruise. Edging [...]

There is a natural path through solar sails, which are now flying, toward beam-driven propulsion, and it’s a path Jim Benford has been exploring for the last eighteen years. In my Centauri Dreams book I described how Jim and brother Gregory ran experiments demonstrating that carbon sails could be driven by microwave beams back in [...]