###
Author’s Notes
1 This article was originally prepared as a portion of the proposal to the Charles A. Lindbergh Fund which resulted in their support of the Solar Sail Project. One of their criteria for funding projects is that there be a balance between technological development and environmental benefit as a result of the work being supported. We have reprinted it here as we feel its pertinence has increased rather than diminished. Planning for environmental safety must be concurrent with mission and technology development.
2 The problems become severe, however, when rockets misfire or explode! Just two accidents with booster rockets plus one satellite blown up by the Soviets on purpose are responsible for half the dangerous debris in orbit today.
###
Robert L. Staehle is president and founder of the World Space Foundation. He began his aerospace career as a high school and college student when his experiment, Bacteria Aboard Skylab, flew twice on America’s first space station. With a B.S. in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University, Mr. Staehle is currently manager of space station science utilization studies at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has been involved in a variety of planetary mission studies and helped to plan observations for the Voyager encounters at Jupiter. The moon and Mars are among his principal fascinations, and Mr. Staehle wrote the first technical paper describing use of solar sails to haul cargo to Mars in support of early expedition crews.
Dr. Louis Friedman is a native of New York City. He received a Ph.D. from the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at M.I.T. in 1971. During the 1970s he worked on several projects while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was the leader of the Halley Comet Rendezvous-Solar Sail Program. He left JPL in 1980 to become executive director of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit, popular society for enhancing the exploration of the planets and the search for extraterrestrial life. Dr. Friedman is the author of Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel.
Afterword
by Arthur C. Clarke
In the old days before the World War II, many popular tales about exploring outer space pictured the adventure taking off on a shoestring—perhaps financed by some eccentric millionaire, or put together in the basement laboratory of some brave, lonely visionaries. Few of us ever thought space flight would someday become a monopoly of huge governments, operating on such a mammoth scale.
Perhaps we were naive, underestimating the magnitude of the problems involved. Anyway, don’t get me wrong. Much of the work of NASA and ESA and other big space institutions has been marvelous. Even miraculous. Still, isn’t it somewhat intimidating and remote? It’s so hard for the average citizen to feel he or she is a participant.
Don’t you sometimes wish there was a David to cheer for? Not so much to defeat Goliath, as to give him a little honest competition?
That is what this volume has been all about. It is the reason so many of us gave our time and creativity, in order to give a little boost to an idea. Perhaps it’s only a magnificently crazy idea. On the other hand, it may also be one whose time at last has come.
To those who bought this volume, thank you for your help. But now comes the bonus. There is a way you can contribute even more. Just send in the coupon at the back of this book. (Or send a photocopy if—like me—you can’t bring yourself to rip out pages!) With your paid membership in the World Space Foundation, you’ll get the foundation’s fascinating periodicals concerning the cutting edge of space exploration, and much more. I am also assured that the names of all contributors will be inscribed upon a scroll, which will be the most important cargo carried aboard the first test mission of the foundation’s solar sail.
The planned trajectory? Why, past the moon, of course! And beyond. Now if only there were a way to go along in person!
Well, perhaps next time. Perhaps indeed.
Project Solar Sail Page 24