Sailing Into Space
Nowadays, everything is near-enough solar powered. Entire houses, automobiles, airplanes, full-sized arenas and sport stadiums. The list, undoubtedly, goes on. Your head would explode if you knew what lengths mankind has gone to utilise the energy of that mighty orb in the sky that produces four billion kilograms of the stuff per second. Solar science, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. When the two meet, as it has done since the time of the Ancient Babylonians, the result is undeniably astonishing.
Recently, NASA has been granted funding for Phase Three of the Innovative Advanced Concepts program. This project has been allowed two years of continuing to explore and develop a diffractive solar sail—a literal sail that uses sunlight to move through space. The intricately designed sail would use the photons produced by the sun to create momentum, not using any fuel.
This concept, to be honest, has already been developed and used, to some success. Between 1992 and 2003, the government of India had launched small, solar sail-powered missions on commercial satellites and back in 2005, The Planetary Society attempted to launch the Cosmos 1 probe into orbit around Earth. Unfortunately the orbit never happened, due to a rocket malfunction. The Japanese have jumped on board too, flying sails up to the sun. Even NASA has launched successfully into lower orbit.
So this concept is a bit old-hat, however this smaller project model, which will use smaller grates and thin films, will hopefully be more adaptable and versatile for conceptual solar missions.