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 ...

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.

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

A project to develop diffractive solar sails has advanced to the third and final phase of NASA’s advanced concepts program. The team behind the project now has two years to further develop this ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The advent of Code Zero sails more than 20 years ago set off a revolution in offshore raceboat performance. Paul Cayard’s team on EF Language in the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race, with North ...

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 ...