Talk:The Physics of Solar Sailing

Orbital mechanics can be a little confusing, because we do not experience it much in everyday life (ie.:tornadoes and toilets). It might help to realize that rather than being relatively static, like you standing on the ground, flying a kite in the wind, bodies in orbit are like being on a merry-go-round, with a spring of gravity pulling you toward the center. Your distance from the center is powerfully determined by your orbital speed, not by the direction of your push. This is because there is a huge amount of energy in your orbit, and only a very tiny bit in your rocket or sail. Therefore, to go away from the center, increasing your orbital speed just a little causes your orbit to grow almost instantly, and conversely, slowing it causes you to drop closer to the center. If you can easily keep that in mind, it might help further to see your ‘spring’ of gravity as ‘bouncey’. Assuming you’re in a simple circular orbit (standing still on the MGR), a push which speeds (you up) or slows you (down), puts you into an elliptical (can be called “transfer”) orbit and it takes another carefully timed push to round out your orbit (stabilize your altitude) at any point in the new ellipse that you want. By the way, I think tornadoes & toilets spin the way they do, because, although the earth, and everything touching it, are forced (because of friction) to rotate (orbit) around the nearest point on a line called the axis of the earth, which goes thru the poles, the particles of which they are made (molecules or debris), are trying to orbit the gravitational center of the earth, which is farther away on the axis (unless you are on the equator). Some descriptions of the so-called Coriolis Force or Effect might be helpful.