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 ...

A new study examines structural buckling as a control method for solar sails, detailing kirigami cuts, simulations, and experiments to adjust spacecraft orientation efficiently.

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 ...

The Sunjammer solar sail spacecraft will use 5 micron thick Kapton film as a sail material. An investigation into the materials available and determined that 5 micron Kapton and .9 micron Mylar are ...

DAVID LEVIN: You're listening to a NOVA podcast. I'm David Levin. The next generation of spacecraft will travel faster than ever before. But they might not be propelled by rockets. If Dean Alhorn has ...

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 ...

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 ...

Not necessarily. Re orient the sail on the way in to use the destination sun to brake. It doesn't need to slow all the way to a stop, just enough to get into some sort of orbit. Then it just uses the ...