Sailing Into Space

A delightful week filled with the usual thematic coincidences. Monday evening, the Harry Ransom Center screened early silent films by cinemagician Georges Méliès—my favorite of which was Le voyage a travers l'impossible, 1904, a story about a fantastical voyage to the sun involving a train with balloons, an automobile, an icebox, and a submarine. The film inspired me to look up an essay I wrote some time ago regarding moon folklore—let me tell you the story of a man stranded on the uninhibited island of St. Helena. He trains forty wild geese, called Gansas, to fly carrying a chairlike devise in hopes of escaping isolation. Following a successful test flight with a lamb, he and the birds depart the island, however, as the birds were inhabitants of the moon and their migration season had begun, an unexpected lunar voyage was made. Lovely. The next morning I came across an article about LightSail-1, with solar sails "as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial." LightSail-1 will be launched in 2010 with the hope of demonstrating the possibility of "navigating the cosmos on winds of starlight the way sailors for thousands of years have navigated the ocean on the winds of the Earth." With a big enough sail, there is speculation that speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour could be reached. Take a look, it is quite fascinating: www.planetary.org/programs/projects/solar_sailing/lightsail1.html  

The article in the New York Times concluded with a quote from Dr. Dyson which I found irresistible concerning the overwhelming research that remains before the sails become practical, "think centuries or millennia, not decades" but why not, "we ought to be doing things that are romantic." B