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 ...

Tom Whidden is one of those lucky and rare fellows who has successfully carved a career out of a passion. At the tender age of 18, Mr. Whidden decided that he wanted to be a sail maker, an activity ...

There has been huge progress on laser pushed sails. Laser pushed sails appear to be a path to sending probes up to 20% of the speed of light when we can make 1 gram sails that are one to two meters on ...

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

If you have been dreaming of traveling to another star system, researchers say you may need to use a sail. Penn Engineering and UCLA researchers show that light sails could provide interstellar ...

Racing sails made of laminated materials have been the choice of leading-edge racers for nearly a quarter century. These sails, assembled from panels built of high-strength fibers sandwiched within ...

In a nutshell: NASA announced it is prepared to launch a "next-gen" solar sailor into orbit. The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) is a newly designed satellite meant to test the deployment ...

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 ...