Most space missions rely on chemical rockets for propulsion. Rockets must carry fuel, which increases spacecraft mass and limits their speed and travel distance. For decades, researchers have explored ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...