Sailing the Light

Sailing the Light tells the story of the LightSail mission, a crowdfunded space science project from The Planetary Society.

This groundbreaking mission showed that solar sailing — using the sun’s light to push a spacecraft through space — is a viable propulsion technology for CubeSats. These small, standardized spacecraft are part of a global effort to lower the cost of space exploration. Our LightSail 2 spacecraft, launched 25 June 2019, uses sunlight alone to change its orbit and is currently operating under an extended mission to further advance solar sailing technology.