Cosmos 1: The First Solar Sail
I found this on Bruce Sterling’s Blog and I had to spread it around. This is a private effort to put an experimental solar sail in orbit around the earth. The sail will catch the solar wind and use it to push itself into higher and higher orbit until it completely breaks out of earth orbit and heads off into deep space.
It seems to me that it is much too small to catch much kenetic energy, considering that the solar wind is not very strong. It may take 100 years to get anywhere and by then it will be so full of holes from micrometeorites that it won’t be working anymore.
