Sail-Powered Spaceships: A Real Possibility To Travel To Other Stars?
468After marking the history of our species for thousands of years, sailing has continued to exert an irresistible fascination even in the years of its decline.
The term "solar sail" and to describe the technical foundations of a propulsion system capable of exploiting the pressure exerted by sunlight.
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But already Johannes Kepler, if we want to go back to times when intuition could not be supported by evidence of feasibility, proved to be able to look into the future, so much so that after observing the behavior of the tail of a comet, which always turns in the opposite direction to the Sun regardless of its movement and its position, he wrote to his "colleague" Galileo in 1610: "Give me ships with sails suitable for the celestial wind, and there will be people who will not fear for themselves even in front of that immensity".
Returning to our times, in the mid-60s, with the advent of new lighter materials, NASA began to think about studying their possible practical applications. However, due to ups and downs related to the management of funds, agency policy, and more profitable programs both in terms of image and, above all, money, such as Apollo and the Shuttle, the study of a solar sail project was permanently shelved when at the end of the '70s was discarded to conduct an automated mission on Halley's comet, which was not realized at all.
But by then the idea of the solar sail had captured the imagination of engineers and scientists and so it was that, since the early '80s, were mostly private efforts to try to realize the first solar sail vehicle in history.
In 1992, NASA scientist Klaus Heiss proposed to organize, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, a real race from Earth to Mars: the Columbus 500 Space Sail Cup. But the project - started well - aborted for economic reasons. The race would have involved three spacecraft, one American, one European, and one Asian, driven solely by the pressure of light. The departure was scheduled for October 12, 1992 (Columbus Day), with destination another “new world”: Mars. The race unfortunately never started, but several research centers worked to design the vehicles that could have participated.
Even the European Space Agency had a solar sail project, called Odyssee, which in turn, however, has stopped for over three years to preliminary test deployment of the sail.
More recently, in 2010, the Japan Space Agency launched the IKAROS mission, the first interplanetary sail probe in history. Able to reach the orbit of Venus in six months of travel propelled by a solar sail of about 200 square meters.
Which, only in 2019 was followed by LightSail 2, the mission wanted by the Planetary Society to test the maneuverability of a 32 square meter sail placed in Earth orbit at a height of 720 km.
In practice, only a couple of successes in more than 20 years of missions funded and then canceled, or aborted due to problems with the rockets during launches...
As it can be guessed, the extreme complexity of such a project, not to mention the high costs and the extreme economic precariousness with which these "minor" programs often have to deal, have made these projects uncertain over the years, with partial results or at least very difficult to achieve.
However, NASA considers fundamental the use of solar sails for space exploration and illustrates its motivations by referring to the well-known fable "the tortoise and the hare", where the current rockets are the hare while the solar sail is the tortoise. In this race, the rocket-propelled vehicle quickly takes the lead, overtaking the solar sail vehicle, which instead proceeds at a slow but steady pace. Sooner or later, no matter how fast you go, the rocket will run out of fuel while the sail vehicle will have an infinite supply of energy, given by the Sun. The latter could even potentially return to Earth, while the rocket vehicle would have no propellant at all.
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