light sail n.

She went by light-sail ship. And she had to cross space—space, where the danger always waits.

That’s the solar wind. You get the same problem around any yellow sun. With a light-sail you can get push from the solar wind as well as from light pressure. The trouble is, the solar wind is just stripped hydrogen atoms. Light bounces from a light-sail, but the solar wind just hits the sail and sticks.

‘Jerome Finney…showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.’ ‘That would mean a light-sail! ’ ‘Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew. ’ ‘No. This is the first I've heard of it. I don’t read the Sunday supplements. ’ Morris was exasperated. ‘But you knew enough to call a laser cannon a launching laser! ’

‘The spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.’ ‘Oh,’ I got it then. ‘That would mean a light sail.’

‘You knew we were dealing with a light-sail propulsion system, sir?… Sunlight per square centimeter falling on a light sail decreases as the square of the distance from the star. Acceleration varies directly as the sunlight reflected from the sail.’… Renner made another parabola, very like the first, but in blue. ‘The stellar wind can also propel a light sail. Thrust varies about the same way. The important difference is that the stellar wind is atomic nuclei. They stick where they hit the sail. The momentum is transferred directly—and it’s all radial to the sun.’

With the laser power off, Prometheus had to make do with the weak red photons from Barnard. Although not powerful enough to have slowed the lightsail in its headlong relativistic flight, the light pressure was enough to swing the sail into a looping orbit that took Prometheus on a journey past the major planets in the system.

Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the libration point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but we need a lightsail to hold us here, twenty tons of aluminum spun into a hexagon, ten kilometres from side to side. That sail towed us out from Earth orbit, and now it’s our anchor.

Small unmanned starships, laser-powered robot drones, unfurling great lightsails and gliding starwards on the urgent breath of photonic winds that we ourselves stirred up.

Light-sails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still light-sail races, an expensive, uncomfortable and dangerous sport… The last refuge of the light-sail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The light-sails are all cargo craft.

The torn shred of aluminum lightsail rippled lightly down through the thin atmosphere.

The unanticipated flare would be pouring our wholly unexpected floods of photons, and, as the light sail had already been deployed to help in Mayflower’s long, slow deceleration, the fare would be shoving them off course and their speed would be decreasing too rapidly.

They have a policy of buying up your contract while you’re still swimming in your Jesus tanks. ‘Nightfreighting’: shipping mining plants and crew out to the asteroids in the form of cheap light-sail drivers with slap-on tector packages.

The rest of the first forty seconds or so showed them deploying a light sail, sailing away from Alpha Centauri with a couple of gravity assists, making their way to the solar system, and descending to Earth.

The breaking wave of particles, with multiple gravity assists from Luvah and Enitharmon, would surf the bright flotilla up to interstellar velocities, as, at the end of the centuries—millennia—long flights, the light-sails would brake the packages at their destinations.

He had started turning Skade’s light-sails to his own side, training his own optical lasers on them as they passed in the night and steering them into the paths of the chasing ships.

Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber’s installations in low-Jupiter orbit.