[ExI] Breakthrough Starshot - To The Stars!

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 6:58 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But that's not Putting Some Physical Object There (At Least Briefly),
> which seems to be the real mission specification, with what you can
> actually do with it an afterthought.
>
### Well, if you launch a large number of probes flying close together, you
could make a deceleration system. Have thousands of mirrors with nothing
but lasers installed, when the probes get close to the target the lasers
deploy, focusing thousands of beams on a few of the probes with exploratory
payload, decelerating them to orbital speed. You would not need a
completely new technology, merely solid state lasers powered by e.g.
nuclear thermoelectric batteries, and enough Earth-based lasers to launch
the probes close enough to allow formation flight.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160415/2cd38310/attachment.html>