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 ...

A NASA-funded project is developing new technologies that would allow a spacecraft to fly through the cosmos propelled entirely with solar sails that "bend" light. The agency announced Tuesday that it ...

Nasa has unfurled a solar sail in space for the first time, aiming to harness the propulsive power of sunlight for interstellar travel. The US space agency revealed that it had deployed the solar sail ...

Depending on the mission they've been created to fulfill spacecraft can be powered by a variety of technologies. Presently, the most widespread is the one that uses propellant and rocket engines. But ...

Video shows NASA's futuristic solar sail technology prototype. Like a sail on the ocean propels a boat with the wind, this ...

Nearly 70 years after the launch of the first satellite, we still have more questions than answers about space. But a team of Berkeley researchers is on a mission to change this with a proposal to ...

Sails have been in use to propel ships across lakes and oceans for thousands of years. They're simple tools that use the wind to move vessels through the water — and in some cases, across the land.

It takes a lot of power to get a spacecraft through Earth’s atmosphere and out of its gravity. But once a craft has reached orbit, it requires relatively little power to move through space. In fact, ...