By COLLIN SMITH
Staff Writer
As futuristic as it sounds it has already been used in much smaller scales. So what is it, sailing via starlight is very similar in concept to old naval ships that used wind sails, but instead of wind as an accelerant it is light. Its functional name is a solar sail which is a piece of extremely reflective and flexible material as of more recent times these solar sails have only been used on smaller objects such as satellites. Now how it works is it uses light, which sounds a little strange, but light moves it. Not like it’s just poof, it’s there, but moves at extreme speeds and these solar sails use it as thrust. Now it only really works because there isn’t gravity in space so an object can actually gain large speed by using light emitted from the sun to accelerate through space. Now I would love to get into the numbers and the real science but that would overwhelm most people, but if you are interested there is a link to a much more in depth video.
Real Engineering : How to sail on starlight