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starship-design: Kelly's new design
Kelly,
First off, I saw the new web site and it looks good.
I was thinking about your idea to use lithium as the sail material, and I was
wondering if you had considered the fact that lithium absorbs hydrogen? I'm
pretty sure that at any speed we'd be going, any hydrogen that came in contact
with the lithium would absorb into the sail, possibly changing it's reflectivity
and other properties (such as tensile strength etc.) This is a separate issue
from the "erosion" problem that was identified earlier
--
Kevin "Tex" Houston http://umn.edu/~hous0042/index.html