Over the last two decades, Les Johnson and his team of engineers have quietly been pushing NASA into a new era of space exploration while nobody was paying attention. As an engineer at the legendary ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. How do you design a sail that can get a spacecraft to another solar system? NASA's Voyager 1 and ...

Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Chairman of Breakthrough Initiatives, Dr. Pete Worden, discusses the Breakthrough Starshot work on the laser propelled solar sail to Proxima Centauri.

Solar sailing has moved from science fiction concept to working hardware, and now a new generation of entrepreneurs wants to turn that gentle push of sunlight into a commercial engine. Instead of ...

Illustration of a solar sail above the Earth. Researchers have proposed using a lightweight sail propelled by laser light to go to another star system. A sailboat moves forward when the wind blows up ...

"As humanity continues to expand space exploration, chemical propulsion will hit its limit." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

1. Introduction to solar sailing -- 2. Solar radiation pressure -- 3. Solar sail design -- 4. Solar sail orbital dynamics -- 5. Non-Keplerian orbits -- 6. Mission application case studies -- 7.

Breakthrough Starship wants to use a 100 Gigawatt laser array to push an ultralight 4 meter X 4 meter nanocrystal solar sail. StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, ...

It's interesting when you look back at the history of space exploration and realize that propulsion technology hasn't really changed very much. The earliest rocket prototypes were nothing more than ...

NASA’s ACS3 (Advanced Composite Solar Sail System) is currently fully deployed in low Earth orbit, and stargazers can spot it if they know what to look for. It’s actually one of the brightest things ...