How does a solar sail return to its world?
While trying to figure out a way that individuals could own spacecraft in my sci-fi setting without having access to things that could double as weapons of mass destruction, I settled on the widespread adoption of civilian solar sails, or more specifically, photon-particle sails.
It has quite a few advantages, like being mechanically simple and cheap to produce with bulk graphene production, along with having an omnipresent power source. The only problem is this omnipresent power source is unidirectional.
Even worse, there is a limit to how many lasers can be fired from X, Y, and Z bodies, to redirect these hundreds of thousands of crafts, along with the economic costs of firing all that energy and possible lack of infrastructure depending on where you're going.
How can a craft powered by solar wind and rays return to their place in the inner solar system?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/91512. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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