3 ms·

I agree. Tacking requires "levering" against a fulcrum (the the centerboard on a water yacht and the skates on an ice yacht. Imaging trying to tack on a frictio

• hinkley 9y ago
  Anything we can get out of our gravity well will have an orbit around the sun. If it didn’t you wouldn’t bother with a high impulse/low thrust engine like this. Your momentum is what you’d be pushing against. Specifically, using a force vector with a substantial component (greater than 50%) in the opposite direction of travel. It would push you out but also slow you down. This kind of vectoring should be straightforward with a solar sail because it is flat. But if a magnetic field is perfectly spherical then there aren’t any angles. You’d have to make a fairly flat magnetic field to pull that off.