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Minimum usable acceleration for a spacecraft
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(02-01-2023, 11:19 PM)Drashner1 Wrote: I'm not saying that it would, I'm saying that even if it did, it wouldn't matter. Most solar sail missions that I've ever read about involve moving cargo around in support of some other crewed mission or base (since sails are comparatively cheap, reusable and don't consume reaction mass) or being used on probe missions where spending years is likely not a problem (based on our RL experience).

Solar sails are not the fastest idea ever suggested, but when considering the range of tech options that we are currently capable of and/or have some idea of how to actually build (speaking conservatively), nothing else significantly outperforms them AFAIK. I'm not counting various flavors of beamed energy/mass atm (sort of outside the context of this), and we have no actual clue how to build a fusion drive or the like, so not counting that either.
I understand but tbh I took the quote to apply in general, my inquiry was not specifically about solar sails but under 0.005 g thrust in general. But the quote does seem wrong to me, but I don't have the math to disprove it so I hope someone can Smile

EDIT:

The whole thing may have been caused by the misuse of centigee as 0.001 g (really should be milligee) and milligee as 0.0001 g (which is really 1/10th of a milligee).

I was searching something about solar gravity at Earth orbit and found this:

https://space.stackexchange.com/question...of-the-sun

Quote:Sun's gravity in the neighborhood of earth is 6 millimeters/sec^2. Out in the Main Asteroid Belt it is less than 1 millimeter/sec^2. So for heliocentric orbits a little further out, ion might be adequate for an impulsive burn injection into an elliptical transfer orbit.
6 mm/sec2 = 0.0006 G.
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RE: Minimum usable acceleration for a spacecraft - by MichaelPoole - 02-02-2023, 03:33 AM

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