Sailing

Six­ty years ago. It was some time about 1961 and I was a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son. At the time, I was work­ing on my master’s degree in the Speech Depart­ment, where­in was housed the The­atre Depart­ment, for it was the­atre I was inter­est­ed in, work­ing at try­ing to become a play­wright. At some point that year I would enter the stu­dent play­wright con­test. I had entered the year before, with no suc­cess, but that year I wrote a one-act play called A Lit­tle Rebel­lion. It won the con­test. The play was staged and pub­lished in the stu­dent lit­er­ary mag­a­zine … my first publication.

As was com­mon, I lived in an off-cam­pus house with a bunch of guys. I don’t remem­ber their names, but it was all ami­able. I have no idea how we got togeth­er but a few of the fel­lows were grad­u­ate stu­dents in physics. All told, there were maybe five of us, each with our room, the kitchen used in com­mon, like­wise the liv­ing room.

The liv­ing room was open space, and room­mates con­gre­gat­ed there for the end­less talk about every top­ic in the world, talk being the pri­ma­ry cur­ren­cy of stu­dent life. Into that liv­ing room, came the friends of room mates, and the talk bub­bled on.

One evening, when I walked into the liv­ing room, two of the physics guys were there. They had brought a friend, a fel­low grad­u­ate stu­dent. “Avi,” they said by way of intro­duc­tion, “this is Carl Sagan.”

(At the time, he was a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, so I have no idea why he was in Madi­son. I sup­pose my room mates were friends of his.)

I sat down and lis­tened. They were talk­ing astro­physics, some­thing I knew noth­ing about—other than sci­ence fic­tion. The one doing most of the talk­ing was Sagan. He was engag­ing, indeed, charis­mat­ic, and he was hold­ing forth about space trav­el. It was, to say the least, fas­ci­nat­ing. I nev­er for­got one aston­ish­ing idea he put forth:

The way to trav­el in space was to build space sail­ing ships, whose gigan­tic sails would catch the force emit­ted by the sun.

New York, July 31, 2019. CNN About 450 miles above Earth, a small satel­lite is drift­ing deep­er into the cos­mos — pow­ered not by rock­et fuel, thrusters or oth­er con­trap­tions. This satel­lite, called Light­Sail 2, is sail­ing on a sunbeam.

The pro­to­type space­craft is the work of the Plan­e­tary Soci­ety, an inter­na­tion­al non­prof­it head­ed by famed sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Bill Nye. Its mis­sion was declared a suc­cess on Wednes­day, mark­ing the cul­mi­na­tion of a years-long effort to prove a satel­lite can surf through space using sun­light as an end­less fuel supply.

It only took six­ty years.