[FPSPACE] Sailing, sailing...

[Allen Thomson]

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SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 58
June 22, 2005


AN ENCOMIUM ON SOLAR SAILING (RESTRICTED)

Cosmos 1, an innovative solar sailing spacecraft that would use solar 
radiation for propulsion, reportedly suffered a launch failure today. 
Cosmos 1 was sponsored by Cosmos Studios and supported by The Planetary 
Society.

But solar sailing is "extremely promising," according to a "restricted 
access" report prepared at Los Alamos in 1973.  The technology would enable 
"travel essentially at will throughout the solar system, achieving quite 
reasonable flight times for a broad category of interesting interplanetary 
missions."

The "restricted" Los Alamos report, by Theodore P. Cotter, expanded upon two 
earlier sources:  a 1958 paper by Richard L. Garwin in the journal Jet 
Propulsion, and a 1951 article by the pseudonymous Russell Saunders in 
Astounding Science Fiction.

The concepts independently described by those two previous writers, the Los 
Alamos author wrote, "are physically sound, quantitatively correct and 
extremely promising."

Today, access to the 1973 Cotter paper is "restricted to selected government 
agencies," states the web site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory 
research library.

It is one of many thousands of unclassified technical papers that were 
removed from online public access in the post-9/11 clampdown on public 
information.

A copy is nevertheless available from the Federation of American Scientists.

See "An Encomium on Solar Sailing" by T.P. Cotter, Report No.  LA-5231-MS, 
May 1973, 8 pp.:

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00390190.pdf


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http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/science_fiction.html  indicates that 
"Russell Saunders" was an engineer named Carl Wiley.

Apparently the same Carl Wiley was also an originator of the synthetic 
aperture radar concept at about the same time he wrote his pseudonymous 
solar sail piece for Astounding.  Sounds like an interesting guy -- if 
anyone knows more about him, please let us know.