Page "Sailcraft" Paragraph 7

* In the context of spaceflight, Sailcraft is a short name for spacecraft endowed with sail for propulsion purposes.

In principle, the sail and its supporting structures, or the sail system, are not restricted to be for solar-sail propulsion, but they could be designed for either laser or microwave propulsion ( i. e. beam-driven propulsion ) or, as recently proposed, for solar and beam-driven purposes.

The key point – from the spacecraft design viewpoint – is the presence of a system with a surface overwhelming those of any other systems the spacecraft is composed of.

This affects the geometrical and physical configurations of the spacecraft systems considerably.

Nevertheless, the benefits from using a solar sail would be enormous.