From the planetary society comes word that Cosmos 1, the first private solar sail craft is ready for launch on June 21, 2005. Solar sails have some very poetic capabilities. That is a remarkable 0.003c.

Ultimate space-manufactured solar sails will allow the possibility of Earth-Mars round trips with durations measured in months rather than years. The same technology may allow visits to the nearer stars at solar-system exit velocities higher than 1000 km /sec. The 1-way travel time to the Sun’s nearest interstellar neighbors (Proxima Centauri) will be ~1 ka for such spacecraft. Advances in laser and maser power-beaming technologies may eventually substantially reduce interstellar-voyage durations.

2020-01-10: Plans for 0.2c

$100m has been put into the Breakthrough Starshot project to push a sail up to 20% the speed of light and send an unmanned probe to Proxima Centauri in 20 years. There is progress on a stabilizing design for a sail to ride the laser beam

2020-06-26: Metamaterial sails

Extreme metamaterial solar sails as proposed here have the potential to shift the paradigm of space exploration enabling numerous low cost and high-speed missions to be launched anytime and anywhere. Such sails could gain accelerations over 60AU/yr when coupled to low mass spacecraft and dive to extreme proximity to the sun (just 2-5 solar radii). This velocity is 20x more than Voyager 1

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