It has been about two years since Yuri Milner announced his most audacious piece of science-focused philanthropy: Breakthrough Starshot, an attempt to send hardware to Alpha Centauri by mid-century.

ESA engineers are looking at using the world's thinnest known material to build lighter, more efficient solar sails. By making sails out of one-atom-thick graphene sheets, the space agency aims to ...

Kāholo stretches its legs on Puget Sound, powered by a new set of offshore-ready sails. Tor Johnson If sails are the engines of the sailboat, my engines were sputtering. After 13 years of use, ...

Laser pushed sails—ultrathin need reflective structures that are square meters but weight a gram. If the sails and the payload each weigh a gram, such a spacecraft could accelerate to one fifth of the ...

Scientists working with a synthetic material 100 times thinner than a piece of paper are testing their theory that the sun can power interplanetary spacecraft. They believe that photons — particles of ...

NASA on Tuesday said it's investing $2 million over two years to advance the development of a new solar sail concept called diffractive lightsailing. With diffractive lightsails, NASA could ...

Current solar sail materials will let us pass within 30 solar radii of the sun but withstanding the heat and getting closer enables far faster speeds. The right metal solar sail would let us get ...

ON A REMOTE ISLAND in the South Pacific, a black box the size of a loaf of bread houses what could be the future of space flight. The precious cargo is the National Aeronautics & Space ...