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.

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods—most notably, they don't use any propellant. But, ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...