A tiny spacecraft orbiting Earth appeared to successfully unfurl a solar sail Tuesday to test the potential of using only sunlight for propulsion, mission officials said. Deployment commands were sent ...

Engineers in California pressed a button on Tuesday that unfurled the sails on a satellite that can be steered around Earth, advancing long-held hopes for an inexhaustible form of spaceflight and ...

Sailing across the cosmos is finally becoming a reality. S Shannon Stirone Follow For centuries, it has been a dream: traveling through space powered only by the solar wind. It was first imagined in ...

NASA has launched the latest attempt to test solar sail propulsion technology. The ACS3’s solar sail is made of a reflective polymer and is held by a boom made of carbon fiber composite material.

PASADENA, Calif. — The world's first spacecraft designed to be propelled by the pressure of sunlight was launched toward orbit Tuesday from a Russian submarine under the Barents Sea. Cosmos 1, a $4 ...

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods—most notably, they don't use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship's captain can ...