Ancient Web: Solar Navigator Left Its 2006 Sunshine Route Plans Online

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Solar Navigator set itself a serious problem: if a boat were to circle the planet on sunshine, where would it go, how long would it take, and would the panels make enough power to get it home?

Visit Solar Navigator's global expedition plan.

The surviving page is half atlas and half calculation notebook. At the top is an A-to-Z geography directory, then a proposed itinerary through Gibraltar, Tenerife, Trinidad, Panama, the Galápagos, Tahiti, Tonga, Fiji, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Red Sea, and back to Europe. A table gives distances in nautical miles and estimated travel days. One route totals 23,609 nautical miles.

It is important to understand that these are plans, not proof that a vessel completed the journey. The page includes historical proposals for solar-powered voyages, describing a 2006 route as an earlier version, along with later hydrogen-hybrid concepts and changing assumptions about cruising speed.

A world tour designed in linked tables

What makes this an unusual old-web artifact is the mixture of engineering arithmetic and sprawling hyperlinks. It estimates solar insolation at waypoints, panel areas, vessel mass, drag, and the consequences of traveling at five, six, seven, or more knots. The navigation study is embedded within dozens of links to country pages, canals, islands, and related project websites.

There is no polished route-planning application hiding the underlying numbers. Visitors are meant to read the tables and follow the calculations from one HTML page to another.

The site's present homepage says the project began with a fifty-foot solar-powered boat concept and now belongs to Cleaner Ocean Foundation Ltd. The old page also retains a hoped-for launch in 2021 and a record attempt in 2022. Those are ambitions left in the document, not dates to describe as completed milestones.

This is not a pristine 1990s snapshot: material was revised and later organizational projects were layered onto it. Its distinctive preservation value is the visible record of a proposed clean-energy expedition that was being worked through online, complete with old scenarios and links that reveal how far the idea wandered.

Explore the original route tables and compare them with the project's later introduction.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.