https://phys.org/news/2019-08-flight-mission-lightsail.html

Quote:

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Mission accomplished: the Planetary Society announced Wednesday that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was launched last month, had successfully raised its orbit using only the power of photons from the Sun.

The team behind the $7 million crowd-funded venture said they had demonstrated a proof of concept for a new form of propulsion that could one day transform deep space exploration by doing away with the need for expensive rockets and fuel.

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This is awesome. IIRC, the previous demonstration of a solar sail wasn't really definitive. So this is still somewhat a proof of concept experiment. The dream of propellant-less spaceflight is close. This only gets you further from the sun, but there's still plenty left in that direction. Now if we can just get that Impossible Engine up and running...

Awesome, but I'm still holding out hope for curvature propulsion.

Cool thing is, this one actually has immediate potential to help make space flight cheaper. Small sats, and the proliferation of small sat launchers( and medium sat multi launches) means that a cheap way to aid in orbital station keeping without propellant or a ton of weight is actually pretty exciting for telecom and unmanned research.

PacifistAg said:

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Awesome, but I'm still holding out hope for curvature propulsion.

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you would be fine with damaging space!