NASA has announced a new vision for spaceflight using the sun’s beams as power.
The diffractive solar sailboat project received $2 million in research and development funding.
Sun beams do exert forces on people and objects.
On Earth, it’s not noticeable — but in the vacuum of space, beams can propel even large objects forward.
If designed successfully, solar sails would eliminate the need for expensive fuel and propulsion technology for spaceflight.
“As we probe the universe deeper than ever before, we need innovative cutting-edge technologies to advance our missions,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.
A solar sail would work in the wind like a kite — but instead of a kite, imagine a spaceship, not the wind, that gets its energy from the sun.
“Each photon produces just a tiny bit of momentum, but the sun emits billions of them every second,” explained Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society and beloved celebrity scientist.
“If we had a spacecraft that was low enough mass, large enough, and reflective enough, photons could give it a little boost.”
However, this thrust is in one direction—scientists are working on rasterizing the sailboard so that it can spread the power and move the boat in three dimensions.
“Diffractive solar sailing is a modern interpretation of the decades-old vision of light sails,” said a researcher close to the project.
In fact, solar sails are an old idea reaching a new level of achievability.
An NBC News report pointed to a correspondence between the famous scientists Johannes Kepler and Galileo.
Kepler wrote to Galileo in 1608: “Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breeze, and some will even brave that void.”
Previous attempts to put light sails into space have met frustrating results — a rocket carrying a prototype exploded before leaving Earth, and another sail broke apart in the atmosphere.
NASA hopes $2 million in new funding will take solar sails from theory to reality.
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