He could press the jettison button now, and save his rescuers a few minutes of time. But he could not do so. He wanted to stay aboard to the very end, on the little boat that had been for so long a part of his dreams and his life. The great sail was spread now at right angles to the sun, exerting its utmost thrust. Long ago it had torn him clear of Earth—and Diana was still gaining speed.
Then, out of nowhere, beyond all doubt or hesitation, he knew what must be done. For the last time, he sat down before the computer that had navigated him halfway to the moon.
When he had finished, he packed the log and his few personal belongings. Clumsily—for he was out of practice, and it was not an easy job to do by oneself—he climbed into the emergency survival suit.
He was just sealing the helmet when the Commodore’s voice called over the radio. “We’ll be alongside in five minutes, Captain. Please cut your sail so we won’t foul it.”
John Merton, first and last skipper of the sun yacht Diana, hesitated for a moment. He looked for the last time around the tiny cabin, with its shining instruments and its neatly arranged controls, now all locked in their final positions. Then he said to the microphone: “I’m abandoning ship. Take your time to pick me up. Diana can look after herself.”
There was no reply from the Commodore, and for that he was grateful. Professor van Stratten would have guessed what was happening—and would know that, in these final moments, he wished to be left alone.
He did not bother to exhaust the airlock, and the rush of escaping gas blew him gently out into space; the thrust he gave her then was his last gift to Diana. She dwindled away from him, sail glittering splendidly in the sunlight that would be hers for centuries to come. Two days from now she would flash past the moon; but the moon, like Earth, could never catch her. Without his mass to slow her down, she would gain two thousand miles an hour in every day of sailing. In a month, she would be traveling faster than any ship that man had ever built.
As the sun’s rays weakened with distance, so her acceleration would fall. But even at the orbit of Mars, she would be gaining a thousand miles an hour in every day. Long before then, she would be moving too swiftly for the sun itself to hold her. Faster than any comet that had ever streaked in from the stars, she would be heading out into the abyss.
The glare of rockets, only a few miles away, caught Merton’s eye. The launch was approaching to pick him up at thousands of times the acceleration that Diana could ever attain. But engines could burn for a few minutes only, before they exhausted their fuel—while Diana would still be gaining speed, driven outward by the sun’s eternal fires, for ages yet to come.
“Goodbye, little ship,” said John Merton. “I wonder what eyes will see you next, how many thousand years from now.”
At last he felt at peace, as the blunt torpedo of the launch nosed up beside him. He would never win the race to the moon; but his would be the first of all man’s ships to set sail on the long journey to the stars.
###
Arthur C. Clarke is from Somerset in England, although he now makes his home in Sri Lanka on the other side of the world. He is well known for his television appearances commenting on the moon flights, as well as for the motion pictures 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two. Yet his reputation rests first upon his excellent science fiction novels like A Fall of Moondust and Childhood’s End, as well as classic short stories such as “The Billion Names of God” and “The Star.”
When it first appeared, this story was entitled “Sunjammer.” (I didn’t know about the Poul Anderson story of the same title. Besides, I like “The Wind from the Sun” better now.) Many of the bright men and women working to develop solar sails have told me that their lifelong interest began when they first read this story back in the 1960s. Flatterers!
To Sail Beyond the Sun
(A Luminous Collage)
by Ray Bradbury and Jonathan V. Post
We all are solar sails
in the tree of heaven climbing free
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved, and blue
As any Yeats found to be true
home-planet Earth
As bright as all the summer air
And in the solar-system’s body, where
I circumnavigate each cell in you
Your merest molecule is right and true
Your moons and planets passing fair
And so we earn what we shall dare
Tossed from the central sun
We with our own concentric fires
Blaze and burn.
Burn and blaze, Until we feel
Once at the hub of wakening
the vast starwheel
Of solar system’s body
A Pegasus of cometary hair
tended by
comet grooms like Kepler and
Galileo Galilee
Whose short-sight probing light-years
saw the way for solar sails to go
To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.
Our rocket selfhood grows
and, rocket-less, more elegantly knows
And claim from Heaven
The Garden we were shunted from,
For now, space-driven
We fit, fix, force and fuse,
Re-hub the system vast
On wings of sunlight, travel fast,
on vector axle, over vacuum’s floor
Respoke starwheel
And at the spiraled core
Plant foot, full fire-shod
and stride the stride of God
whose name is spelled in stars,
and in whose name
We clothe ourselves in flame
Why do we, the solar sails,
fragile as a feather’s frond,
silently seek to sail so far?
We walk the air from here to planet out beyond
Because we’re more than fond of life and what we are.
We are the energy of Shakespeare’s verse,
we are what mathematics wants to be—
The Life Force in the Universe
That longs to See!
That would Become
and give a voice to matter that was dumb.
We are, to the gates of gravity, the keys
We are the Abyss Light that comes from Pleiades
We are the melody of futures flying soon
And what the song, the tune?
To fashion fires and thus outrace the Moon
West is West, and East is East,
but we sail on perpendiculars
To grow man ten ways tall to feast
On Universe and stars
And why did Engineering bend
the force of light to give us play?
To landfall Time, give man Forever’s Day
And free us from well-bottom’s cave
Unlock the doors of light-year grave
Fling wide the portal;
Give man the gift of stars
And so, as solar sail, while children sleep
in atmospheric blanket curled
I bury all the stars in Cosmic Deep
So, listen, world . . .
Is this the setting of the sun of Earth?
No, this is what the future brings:
A million-dozen multitudes of summer things!
O child, they said, avert your eyes.
What does a solar sailor feel?
Avert my eyes? I said, what, from wild skies
Where stars appear and wheel.
And so a sail takes flight
beyond the airy skirts of old Earth-mother
And fills my heart and make me feel as if I might
This night and then another and another
Live forever and not die.
This is life itself, to onward fly
A boy alone with Universe
who knows that he must go into the dark.
God minds m
e to be so. He put the bright sparks in my blood
and taught me to run,
and run again after I fall
Small sparks, large sun—
All one, it is the same.
Large flame or small
as long as my heart is young
the flavor of the night lies on my tongue . . .
The Universe is thronged with fire and light,
And we but smaller suns which, skinned, trapped and kept
where we have dreamed, and laughed, and wept
Enshrined in blood and precious bones,
with heartbeat’s rhythms, passion’s tones
Hold back the night
Somewhere a band is playing
Where the moon never sets in the sky
And the sun sets never
And Time . . . goes on forever
And hearts then continue to beat
to the pulse of the future coming
To the sound of the old moon-drum drumming
And the glide of Eternity’s feet
Infinity my destination,
until my course is run,
Light hierarchies of Time and, one by one,
With mighty Ra, fall in that final sun
Billions of years ago, Big Bang began the flight
of galaxy from galaxy that was to be
A thousand tigers’ eyes fireworked the night
Quadrillions of years hence,
the suns burnt out, we solar sails still drift
Gone blind from stars and dark of moon
thinned by evaporation from our metal flesh
And saw in X-ray warp and mesh
A sigh of polar-region breath
At first there was but sea and tides by night
fingerboard space with silver starlight frets
and souls’ pure jets.
At first, we dandelion sails were still as death
At first there was no captain to the ship
But: God obtruded, rose and blew his breath
and we went spinning outward from His lip
Sailed . . . through wild dreams
In free-fall fell
God, Nature, Space, all Time, now stand aside we said
Illumine Heaven and relight the coals of Hell
Past Uranus we sailed, that tilted planet saw
And knocked the world half off its axis into awe
What size is Space? A thimble!
No! outside of a sun!
pocked by sun-spots in which gods
could bathe themselves in ion streams
and sleep in plasma magnet dreams . . .
What is this dream of Cosmos
Born from a senseless yearning
Of molecules for form,
Birthed from a mindless burning
Of solar fire-storm—
The Universe, in Needing,
Made flesh of empty space,
And with a mighty seeding
Made pygmy human race . . .
Which now on fires striding
the solar sails to give
on solar lightbeams riding
Wakes up the stars to live
Then off they glide on rafters
of centripetal force
with sails as light as laughters
Of stars like skating ponds.
The ice between the stars
is gravity’s weak bonds
Twin mirror selves of seeing,
each soul to soul responds.
We dance, and spin, and play
We live Forever’s Day
And spawn the Cosmic rivers,
in billions celebrate
with out-from-sunward spinning
No Ending or beginning
Behold! The Mystery stirring . . .
Here in space our dreams are truly ours
Here they lie—in countries where the spacemen
Flow in fire and much desire the Moon
And reach for Mars
on thin metallic wing
And teach the fiery atoms how to sing
Mind’s quest makes footfall here
leaving cradle Earth behind
To transfer across Space to lift Mankind
beyond the reach of ancient fear
The thought that birthed itself to Space
is the thought that knows it knows it knows
Across the solar system’s face
Where now Man goes
Grand Things to Come? Yes! Things to Come!
Starlings, eagles, falcons, larks
we sing from throats no longer dumb
and spread our wings, and soar in arcs
Of wheeling orbs and sparks
From graveyard dirt he shapes a striding man
To jig the stars and go where none else can.
What pulls him there in arrow flight of ships?
A birth of suns that burn from Shakespeare’s flaming lips
From Stratford’s fortress mind we build and go
And strutwork catwalk stars across abyss
The Universe itself is our stage
and our script reads something close to this:
Stand here, grow tall, rehearse
and then surpass the plan.
Be God-grown-Man.
Act out the Universe!
Across the waters of galactic Babylon
We sail, we solar sails, and sing of Zion.
Our golden song goes on and on
The sun whose light we sail upon:
A blazing summer dandelion.
###
What can I say? We can follow this dream, and so many others like it, if we only lift our heads and go!
The Canvas of the Night
by K. Eric Drexler
As the sun sinks from sight one summer evening, a spark appears in the fading light, rising and moving east. Faint at first, it climbs toward the zenith, shrinks to a line, then opens to a hexagon of brilliance slowly turning, sweeping across the sky to redden and vanish in the shadows of the horizon. The next night, it comes again.
As night follows night, the hexagon shrinks to a dot, then to a point drifting slowly across the starry vault circling higher and higher, now above both Earth and its cone of shadow. At last it vanishes, no longer circling, a fading glint among the constellations.
Five centuries after Columbus, the hope of treasure calls once more and a ship sets sail for distant shores. And again, the ship has sails.
Why, one may ask, should a spaceship use sails? On the seas of Earth, engines replaced sails generations ago, and engines of awesome power launch our spacecraft today. Sails will work in space: Einstein showed that energy has mass, and light exerts force when it bounces off a mirror. The pressure of sunlight, however, is terribly weak; using sails to replace rockets in space may seem a step backward.
In fact, the two could prove natural partners, each enabling the other to achieve its potential. To understand this, however, we need to skim a little history.
Rockets are as old as Chinese fireworks. They are compact, powerful, and useful. Unlike sails, they can punch through air and fight strong gravity. Even in the 1930s a few visionaries knew that rockets could lift people to the moon. Rockets were needed for the first big step in space travel, the step off our planet.
Project Apollo with its first “Moonwalk” was a triumph so great that it seemed to be what “the space program” was all about, yet the triumph was not followed up. The voyage of Columbus opened a frontier by sailing to new lands in a reusable ship. Apollo virtually closed a frontier by surveying a wasteland in a machine built at great expense and then thrown away.
Beyond the moon, robots with cameras, launched to the planets, replaced the dream of a jungle-clad Venus with the reality of a vast oven of high-pressure poison; they erased the network of lines drawn by wishful earthbound astronomers on the deserts of Mars, and with them went both canals and Martians.
Many scientists believe Mars does possess water, buried in its dusty permafrost.
Some consider it the next logical step for manned exploration, though not at once for conquest or settlement. Rather, we may find ourselves going there for reasons having to do with earthly concerns . . . to seal a place between East and West, for instance, or to lift our spirits with a common goal.
But it will be next to impossible to go to Mars the way we went to the moon, using wasteful, throwaway rockets. At least not with rockets alone. The crew themselves may travel that way, but the hundreds of tons of supplies they will need, for a mission lasting two years or more, may be shipped by cheaper means, or the trip may not be made at all. Explorers and scientists will not leave footprints in the red soil until, first, robot freighters have hauled there the means of sustaining life.
Anyway, to practical men and women, a Mars expedition would be at best a start. Symbolic gestures are less important than winning riches from space.
Even as the old space program was shriveling and planetary launches had ground to a halt, new opportunities were coming into sight. Today, we have a shuttle and, better, the beginnings of a private launch industry, and we know more about space and our own abilities. There is talk of building important industries in space, where sunlight and vacuum are free and weightlessness offers novel opportunities. Where attention once focused on planets because they were big and bright and somewhat like Earth, people now realize that an asteroid or two could fill a world’s factories and launch a whole new economic frontier.
Between these two poles lies a common problem. The romance of a Mars mission and the gritty practicality of space industry share one attribute, a need for inexpensive propulsion to supplement flashy, inefficient rockets, a need for systems able to haul great cargos, slowly but surely, across vast reaches of space. Although rockets have been used for centuries, light pressure has been known for scarcely a century.
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