Sailing to the Stars

The solar sail, made of aluminum and space-age plastic, has the ability to harness the radiation of the sun for movement. Since outer space is frictionless, the sail could potentially accelerate forever, traveling much faster and much farther than a rocket running on fuel. Travel back to Earth would require a turn of the sail.

NASA researchers, thinking "out of the box" (or maybe "out of the rocket") have long dreamed of the possibility of sailing among the planets with sails propelled by sunlight instead of by wind. Except in works of fiction, though, no one has yet successfully deployed such a sail anywhere beyond Earth.

"There's a first time for everything," says Edward "Sandy" Montgomery of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

If NASA's spacecraft makes it into orbit, it will unfurl the solar sail from its pod, and "use solar pressure as a primary means of attitude control and orbital maneuvering," said Sandy Montgomery of the Marshall Space Flight Center, housed in Huntsville, Ala.

NASA said it means big things for space travel. According to Montgomery, the speed of the solar sail would make it feasible for a spacecraft to leave our solar system in a decade, instead of the 30 years it took for the Voyager missions to get to the edge of the solar system. In theory, rockets would be used for short missions and sails would be used for longer missions.