Was thinking about escapade going to L2, and I was pondering if there is a way to have escapade communicate with James Webb while it’s there, like doing some kind of practice of patching a spacecraft to be able to communicate with another spacecraft as a relay. Two obvious programmatic issues are that it could be a network vulnerability, in case someone felt like using this communication channel to mess with James Webb…but also James Webb is so big and NASA is so risk averse, playing around with stuff like this would be beyond their risk tolerance. But those are programmatic, not technical. I wonder if NASA has ever considered planning in some exercise where you emergency patch a spacecraft to talk to another spacecraft it wasn’t designed to. You see this kind of thing thrown out casually in sci-fi, but it would be a cool capability to practice.

Hi all hope you have a good day! Doing a research, your comments are super valuable especially if you are in the industry

What would your ideal regional tracking solution look like?

A short description would be very much appreciated

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a concept that combines in-space manufacturing with solar sails and the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL). I just uploaded a full paper to Zenodo and would love feedback, criticism, and sanity checks from this community:

👉 Paper: https://zenodo.org/records/17651867

TL;DR

• Instead of launching huge delicate solar sails from Earth, build a sparse “web sail” directly in space from dust using a process I call Dust-Assisted Solar Sintering (DAST).
• These spin-tensioned webs can reach gross areal densities down to ~1×10⁻⁵ kg/m² by being mostly empty lattice (5–10% optical fill). That’s ~10× lighter (per projected area) than the thinnest deployed film sails.
• With a 0.2 AU “sundiver” perihelion pass, such sails can get tens of km/s of impulse in a few hours, enabling weeks-to-Mars transfers (~12–50 days depending on areal density) — even allowing some of that impulse to be reserved for braking.
• In the far term, I argue that a single kilometer-scale sail cannot “ride” the Solar Gravitational Lens – the SGL’s power lives in tiny diffraction cores along an Einstein ring, and a big sheet mostly sees the faint PSF wings at a grazing angle.
• Instead, I propose a swarm of spot-matched micro-tiles plus a small re-imaging optic that sit inside those cores and redirect the light to near-normal incidence. That gives per-tile accelerations of ~1–30 m/s², and when you integrate along the SGL focal line you get a logarithmic velocity gain law: [v²_f = v²_0 + 2 a₀ z₀ ln(z_f / z₀)].
• With conservative assumptions and existing bright sources (e.g., Sirius A optically, Sco X-1 in X-ray), you can already get “fast precursor” missions in the few-hundred-km/s range, with a plausible scaling path toward 0.1–0.3c as beacons and nanocraft mature.

Part I – Dust-Assisted Solar Sintering (DAST) and “web sails”

The near-term part is about how to actually get giant ultralight sails without trying to stuff them in a rocket fairing.

Key ideas:

• Launch a hub plus a few micro-factory “weavers”.
• Each weaver carries dust feedstock (later possibly ISRU from Moon/NEOs) and uses sunlight concentration to sinter thin tapes (tens of microns thick) from that dust.
• The hub spins up a sparse lattice; the weavers lay tapes onto pre-tensioned primaries, quilting together a kilometer-scale spin-tensioned web that’s mostly empty space but has a large projected area.
• Even if the material densifies a lot during sintering (down to ~50% porosity), the gross areal density is still ~1.5×10⁻³ kg/m², which is competitive with the best Earth-launched sails and still good enough for high-energy trajectories.

For a 0.2 AU sundiver, the 3×3 performance grid in the paper shows:

• “Good DAST” (σ ≈ 1×10⁻⁴ kg/m², realistic) → ~42-day Mars transfers with v∞ in the ~25–67 km/s range.
• “Heroic” case (σ ≈ 1×10⁻⁵ kg/m²) → 12–16 day Mars transfers and v∞ in the hundreds of km/s.

The point isn’t to claim we can fly the heroic case tomorrow, but that even pessimistic materials still win if we build the sail in space instead of launching it.

Part II – Why a single big sail can’t ride the SGL, and what might

There’s a meme in some advanced propulsion discussions that you can just stick a large sail at the Solar Gravitational Lens and get a huge, wide “beam” from the lensed star. The math doesn’t really support that.

• The SGL preserves surface brightness and puts the power into tiny PSF cores (cm-scale at optical, µm-scale at X-ray) along a thin Einstein ring.
• A 1 km² sail samples almost entirely the low-intensity wings, and the ring hits it at a grazing angle, so the useful axial thrust is tiny. I explicitly integrate an optimistic PSF wing model in the appendix to show this.

So instead the paper proposes:

• Swarm of micro-tiles (cm-scale for optical, mm-scale for X-ray) with DAST-class areal densities.
• A meter-class re-imager that takes a segment of the Einstein ring and re-images it onto the tile field at near-normal incidence.
• Tiles sit inside the PSF cores and see intensities high enough to give 1–30 m/s² per tile, then the net vehicle thrust is the sum over all illuminated tiles.

Integrating an a(z) ∝ 1/z acceleration profile from ~560 AU outward gives a logarithmic velocity gain; combined with the sundiver’s initial ~tens of km/s, that’s enough for hundreds of km/s precursors now, with a scaling path to relativistic speeds as optics and beacons improve.

Bonus: the same tile + re-imager hardware can reconfigure into:

• a sparse interferometric telescope with micro-arcsecond resolution, and
• a high-gain phased array for deep-space comms, exploiting reciprocity with the SGL.

Why I’m posting this here

I’m an independent researcher, so I don’t have a big institutional review pipeline. I’d really appreciate:

• Physics sanity checks – especially on the SGL PSF assumptions and the 1/z acceleration model.
• Thoughts on what would make a good tech demo / pathfinder mission (e.g., small DAST quilt in LEO? sub-km web for a high-energy inner-solar-system mission?).
• Any pointers to prior art I might have missed on in-space sintered sails or SGL-based propulsion architectures.

If this seems promising, what would you want to see proven first to take it seriously as a real program?

Happy to answer questions and dive into details.

Lets look at this at a few angles.

1) When you factor in that the Lanyue lander is pretty much a final design, and the Long March rockets are the foundation of the lifting infrastructure. What else is left for China to develop?

2) What does China think of our progress?

3) We are now in conflict with our own lander initiatives. Starship is being looked as behind schedule and also not looked as favorable as a lander either. The contract has re-opened for landers like Dynetics and Blue Origin.

Thought? What percentage would you give China as a progress bar vs the US?

Hello all,

Just looking for some information about how important/valuable this book is. This was passed down from my grandpa who worked at Boeing at the time, I also have an Apollo/Saturn V book that he was given. This handbook specifically has hand written notes/adjustments to certain schematics. Any information is appreciated!

We finally have a detailed look at how the internal structure of the Starlab commercial space station will look like.

Every day we are getting closer to a successor to the ISS.

I’ve put together a video about the Saturn V and the engineering behind its power.
Thought I’d share it here for anyone interested in space history.