Rockets are incredibly powerful. You can launch yourself into orbit, fly to the Moon and, soon enough, travel to Mars. But to go beyond our Solar System, you're going to need something else. Solar ...

During the Age of Sail, ships circled the globe on voyages of discovery and trade. That era ended in the 1800s, when coal-fired steam engines began to replace wind power. Now we may be entering a new ...

Nearly 70 years after the launch of the first satellite, we still have more questions than answers about space. But a team of Berkeley researchers is on a mission to change this with a proposal to ...

An experimental NASA solar sail can be seen in the night sky as it orbits the Earth. NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) launched in April 2024 atop a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The ...

NASA is preparing to launch its massive solar sail into space on the back of a rocket to test the power of sunlight and determine whether it will be a viable means of propulsion to traverse the solar ...

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