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.

To see if graphene has any promise as a sail material, researchers took a patch of graphene sheet 3 mm across and dropped it inside a 100-meter-high (330-ft) vacuum tower. As it went into free-fall, ...

Kāholo stretches its legs on Puget Sound, powered by a new set of offshore-ready sails. Tor Johnson If sails are the engines of the sailboat, my engines were sputtering. After 13 years of use, ...

Stable flight of a laser sail is an essential requirement of beam-driven propulsion. Centauri Dreams talked to James Benford about work towards stable beam flight. It places considerable demand upon ...

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 ...