Listening to Michael Longcor's song 'Windward Passage' started me wondering how workable a solar sail would be as a way of moving things around in space and how much of the answer I could calculate on the basis of simple physics. I like figuring things out for myself, both because it is fun and because I do not entirely trust someone else's conclusions if I have no way of checking them. It is an attitude reinforced by my experience in the climate debate, where I have found that expert conclusions quite often should not be trusted.1 One of my climate posts argued the superiority of an approximate analysis that the reader could check over more expert and precise analyses that he couldn't ' and offered one. Centrifugal acceleration, acceleration away from the sun driven by the pressure of light from the sun, is proportional to the ratio between the area of the sail and the mass of the ship; without additional assumptions about the material the sail is made of I have no way of bounding...
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