Solar Sail Craft Damaged

C. Mattix writes "It looks like we won't know if the solar sail will work for a while. There was an accident prior to launch that will delay it for quite some time. Full story from Yahoo."

Comments

I suspect the Russians

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too big a coincidence that an accident like this would happen right when America was trying to launch its next generation of space craft. There are no coincidences in this world. It must have been Russian sabbotage.

The Russian space agency must be reeling, now that MIR is out of the sky. They were once a proud nation with a proud space heritage, but now they're a third-world grounded nation begging for international aid from the west. That has to hurt.

So what do they do? They sabbotage America's glorious space program. They're jealous of our potential and they're jealous of our success. They never forgot that we were the first nation in history to successfully fake a moon landing, and they won't forgive us NASA's recent successes with missions to Mars. Worse than that, we insulted their collective genitalia with Taco Bell's publicity stunt which put a target in the Pacific ocean for MIR to land on.

NASA is far too clever to have caused this accident by their own incompetence. America is too strong a nation to let such accidents get in the way of our manifest destiny. We must find the spy who committed this act of terrorist espionage and bring him to justice.

The Cold War is very much alive.

Good, solar sails are too dangerous to be allowed

[typical geek]

I'm glad it hasn't been launched, solar sails are far too dangerous to be allowed in orbit.

Before you condem me, think of the facts. They are talking about orbiting a huge, acre sized, piece of mylar, with controls to change it's orientation.

It's a giant space mirror!

For those of you didn't read the Mars trilogy, think back to the first time you played with a magnifying glass in your backyard.

Now, scale that up to a beam of light, a yard wide and more intense than a steel melting laser beam. Think what the beam of light could do to any cities or countries that don't kow-tow to the US-Russian space hegemony.

Worried yet?

Thus...

[Dancin_Santa]

Thus proving what we developers already know: QA is the cause of all our problems.

Dancin Santa

Re:This is not NASA

[s20451]

Actually there were space shuttle experiment in 1992 and 1996 to study the use of tethers. Look here for more. I believe at least one of these experiments ended in failure when the tether broke; both tethers and solar sails are highly susceptible to micrometeorite impacts.

NASA has also flown experimental ion propulsion technology on the Deep Space 1 mission, and has a research team at JPL investigating advanced propulsion concepts. You may have heard of a proposal for magnetic-assisted propulsion to travel to Pluto; IIRC that was one of theirs.

I don't know of any NASA attempt to use solar sails, though.