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"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
- George Orwell
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| Starlight Sail (Light Sail) | ||
| A light sail capable of sailing between solar systems. |
I don't know of an earlier reference to light sails in science fiction.
| "Now this is the way that the foresail works. That sail will be twenty thousand miles at the wide part. It tapers down and the total length will be just under eighty-thousand miles. It will be retracted or extended by small servo-robots. The servo-robots are radio-controlled." |
| Technovelgy from The Lady Who Sailed The Soul,
by Cordwainer Smith. Published by Galaxy in 1960 Additional resources -
|
The pilot lived in a tiny control room; flights lasted an average of forty years. The ship had a string of thousands of adiabatic pods, each containing a passenger.
See the longer discussion of light sails (solar sails) from Jack Vance's Sail 25.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
More Ideas
and Technology by Cordwainer Smith
Tech news articles related to The Lady Who Sailed The Soul
Tech news articles related to works by Cordwainer Smith
Starlight Sail (Light Sail)-related
news articles:
- Cosmos 1 Sets Solar Sail - Update
- NanoSail-D Solar Wind-Rider
- Ikaros Solar Sail Craft Photo Of Venus
- Bigrating Laser Beam-Riding Light Sail Is Self-Correcting
| The First Space Warship For Space Force |
| Is China Mining Helium-3 On The Moon's Farside? |
| Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space |
| Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic |
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
