Apr 27, 06 : KiteShip Featured in Popular Science
"Dave Culp has a radical vision. He sees enormous diesel ships—cargo carriers and supertankers and luxury liners, vessels weighing tens of thousands of tons—hitched to giant kites and towed on their courses by ocean winds. He sees the ancient kite becoming a crucial technology of global trade, a tool to move goods and passengers cleanly and swiftly around the world.
"It's a romantic idea. But Culp, a designer of recreational kitesails who has become the chief American proponent of a return to sail power, is far from alone.
"Last year the German government handed almost $1 million to a start-up, SkySails, that has precisely the same long-term aim as Culp's company: to retrofit a substantial segment of the world's commercial fleet with huge fuel-saving kites. The large Swedish shipping company Wallenius Wilhelmsen recently announced plans to build the first zero-emmissions cargo vessel, featuring 45,000 square feet of rigid sail. Denmark and Japan have similar initiatives under way and in England an inventor named Richard Dryden has dedvised a retractable modular sail based on the structure and aerodynamic properties of a bat's wing."
More at: >>www.dcss.org/PopSci_May_06.pdf<<