Eric Storm 11/05/02
Robert L. Forward's dream of a laser one day propelling a sail into the far reaches of interstellar space is coming much closer to reality with plans by the privately funded Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios to launch a solar sail spacecraft in late 2002. A previous test of the solar sail craft in July 2001 failed to deploy from the third stage of the Volna rocket.
Beamed energy propulsion remains a concept to be tested in space, in which sunlight, microwaves, lasers or a combination of these energies is aimed and focussed on a highly thin and reflective surface to propel a payload to its destinations. This concept has remained very popular to scientists and enthusiasts interested in interstellar voyages to study the heliosphere, Ort cloud and neighboring star systems because such a propulsion method requires little or no fuel to reach its destination.
In the 1960's Robert L. Forward, a pioneering space engineer and advocate was probably the first to devise the idea of actually using a lasar to propel a sail instead of sunlight. The laser pushed light sail has become one of the most popular interstellar propulsion concepts because this method is one of the few ideas that actually has the potential to reach the stars. A light sail pushed only by the sun would lose almost all of its energy by the time it reached Jupiter and as a result would lack the necessary thrust to escape the solar system at a high enough velocity to enable practical interstellar voyages. The laser concept has the theoretical potential to reach a velocity of .1c (10% the speed of light), by focussing a beam of light on the spacecraft's sail for an extended period of time into the darker reaches of space, enabling more time for the craft to build up momentum.
The solar sail spacecraft, called Cosmos 1, is under contract with the Babakin Space Center in Russia and will be launched from a Russian submarine on a cold war era Volna Rocket to an altitude of 800 Kilometers. Leonard David of Space.com reports that once fully deployed Cosmos1 will be given a boost by a microwave beam via a powerful radio dish in Goldstone California, part of Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network. Cont. . .
. kherson. rent odessa., poland.
