A laser hit the tiny black cube, and it lurched forward almost at once. That split-second jump, caught during a zero-gravity arc aboard a parabolic flight, points to a strange and promising idea for ...

Laser sail propulsion is an idea that won't go away. By aiming powerful Earth-based lasers at tiny spacecraft with light sails, tiny spacecraft can be accelerated to near-relativistic speeds without ...

A team of researchers from Texas A&M University has demonstrated the use of laser beams to lift and steer tiny engineered devices without physical contact. The findings from the recent experiment are ...

On a clear night in Southern California in late 2024, a handful of photons arrived at the 200-inch mirror of Palomar ...

Porous wood and graphene create a light-trapping propellant that enables efficient laser ablation at unusually low continuous ...

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the moon, Mars and beyond. But these dreams hinge ...

There is no universally accepted upper limit on interstellar flight speeds, but studies tend to converge around 19,000 miles per second (30,000 km/s) – 10% of the speed of light – as a realistic ...

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Every year, companies and space agencies launch ...