{"id":210091,"date":"2025-03-30T13:17:57","date_gmt":"2025-03-30T18:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/researchers-develop-new-design-and-fabrication-method-to-make-lightsails-for-interstellar-travel"},"modified":"2025-03-30T13:17:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T18:17:57","slug":"researchers-develop-new-design-and-fabrication-method-to-make-lightsails-for-interstellar-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/researchers-develop-new-design-and-fabrication-method-to-make-lightsails-for-interstellar-travel","title":{"rendered":"Researchers develop new design and fabrication method to make lightsails for interstellar travel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-develop-new-design-and-fabrication-method-to-make-lightsails-for-interstellar-travel.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membrane designed to ride a column of laser light to incredible speeds.<\/p>\n<p>Since its launch in 1977, NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled over 15 billion miles into deep space. That\u2019s a long way\u2014but it\u2019s not even 1% of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. If humans are going to send ships to the stars, space travel will have to get a lot faster.<\/p>\n<p>One promising way to pick up that kind of speed is a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/lightsail\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">lightsail<\/a>\u201d\u2014a thin, reflective membrane that can be pushed by light much the same way that wind pushes a sailboat. Lightsails have the potential to reduce flight time to nearby stars from several thousand years using current propulsion systems to perhaps just a decade or two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a potential step toward sending small spacecraft to the stars, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, ultra-reflective membrane designed to ride a column of laser light to incredible speeds. Since its launch in 1977, NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 spacecraft has traveled over 15 billion miles into deep space. That\u2019s a long way\u2014but it\u2019s not even 1% [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210091\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}