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 ...

Nextbigfuture has a weekly video review of the big stories in science and technology. The later part of the video discusses laser pushed sails for fast missions around the solar system and then ...

Over the last two decades, Les Johnson and his team of engineers have quietly been pushing NASA into a new era of space exploration while nobody was paying attention. As an engineer at the legendary ...

Engineers are developing a concept for interstellar travel using a swarm of 1,000 ultra-light "laser sails." The mission aims to send these sails to Proxima b, an exoplanet 4.25 light-years away, ...

Space travel can be agonizingly slow: For example, the New Horizons probe took almost 10 years to reach Pluto. Traveling to Proxima Centauri b, the closest habitable planet to Earth, would require ...