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"That's not a solar sail! It's a Space Mirror!"
PLANETARY SOCIETY TO TEST DEATH RAY WEAPON PLATFORM IN SPACE
Islamic Community Net
June 21, 2005

"We estimate that a solar sail could reach speeds of 100,000 miles per hour and for example Voyager One right now is travelling about 37,000 miles per hour and it's going to take it thousands of years to reach the nearest star system. Solar sailing might be able to get us there in a more reasonable time, perhaps within a human lifetime."
-Charlene Anderson, Associate Director of the Planetary Society
Tuesday, 21 June, 2005


Do the math: The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri at a distance of 4.28 light years. Each light year is 5.88 trillion miles. So the distance in miles to the nearest star is 25,166,400,000,000 miles. Even at Anderson's projected 100,000 miles per hour, the "Planetary Society's" "solar sail" would take 251,664,000 hours to get there. There are 365.25 days in a year and 24 hours in a day, for a total of 8766 hours per year. 251,664,000 hours divided by 8766 hours per year yields ***28,709.1*** years.

28,709.1 YEARS!

That's one heck of a "human lifetime" - even a "reasonable" one. The question arises as to why Charlene Anderson, Associate Director of the Planetary Society, would push such a bald-faced lie on the public in support of the Planetary Society's "Cosmos 1" space sail project. Why the fraud?

What's so bad about a "solar sail" that quietly wings its way through the "billions and billions" of stars in Carl Sagan's cosmos that it requires this level of fanciful "travel to the stars in a human lifetime at 100,000 miles per hour" hype to overcome public resistance?
The problem is this: western society has a facility for euphemism. A mass, disorderly retreat by cowardly troops is a "strategic withdrawal of forces". Genocide is called "rural pacification". Legalized baby-killing is "choice". Whores are "commercial sex workers". A christian crusade against Islam is called a "war on terror". And so on.

The pleasantly named "solar sail" evokes a scene of mostly harmless gentle motion in an airless void. Actually the "solar sail" is the latest attempt to orbit a highly reflective "space mirror" with all that that implies. In fact, the solar "sail" is PRECISELY a very highly reflective space mirror. The mission parameters for the Planetary Society's "Cosmos 1" are practically identical to those for the Russian Znamya-3 space mirror that was never implemented - until now:

EXCERPT
Znamya (1997)
Znamya-3 experiment is a significant phase of the SRC reflector development program. It requires substantial modification of a Progress M spacecraft. An additional thin film reflector of much larger size (60-70 meters) will be incorporated to the outer spacecraft structure. A new control device will also be introduced which will allow the spacecraft to control a large moment of inertia without using reaction control thrusters. The Znamya 3 reflector may also incorporate an array of thin film photovoltaics into the reflector structure as part of the test. The main goal of the Znamya-3 experiment is to test a new reflector concept and design in space, and verify major design characteristics.
-

Okay, then, the "solar sail" is really a space mirror. So what's wrong with a "space mirror"? Let's take a peek:

EXCERPT
ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation)
October 24 (year unstated)
"...they feel so confident they're even talking about building mirrors larger than a football field that could be placed in orbit high above the Earth. But instead of facing out, these mirrors would face in, looking at the Earth instead of into space. A mirror that large could provide high-resolution images of half of the globe, allowing scientists to keep track of weather systems, fires, and all sorts of things.


ALL SORTS OF THINGS.

Heh.

And just what "sorts of things"?

Let's see:

EXCERPT:
The dream of the space mirror dates back to Hermann Oberth, the great mathematician and physicist, who in the early 1920s published Ways and Means to Space Navigation. In his book Oberth described various uses for space mirrors, including its destructive forces as a military weapon, capable of destroying cities and incinerating armies in the battlefield from space.

"a military weapon, capable of destroying cities and incinerating armies in the battlefield from space."

Ah, THOSE "sorts of things".

No wonder Charlene Anderson has to lie through her teeth to gain public acceptance for the euphemistically named "space sail".
I knew I should have bought that Alcoa stock.

Posted by: Steve 2005-06-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=122280