Making sailboats blast across ocean waves with speed and efficiency embodies more than just a fixation with adventurous zeal. The process is advancing computer software and robotics, revolutionizing ...

We all know computer design capabilities have changed all aspects of yacht and sail design, but the process of designing a sail inventory for a new one-design is hardly plug-and-play. North Sails ...

Illustration of a solar sail above the Earth. Researchers have proposed using a lightweight sail propelled by laser light to go to another star system. A sailboat moves forward when the wind blows up ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. How do you design a sail that can get a spacecraft to another solar system? NASA's Voyager 1 and ...

The ribbon solar sail will be a solar sail design using a thin film strip embedded with diffractive gratings. It is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project. This configuration leverages ...

The 42-foot Excess 13 slices through the water with asymmetrical hulls and a responsive, lightweight structure designed for bluewater cruising. Courtesy Excess Boat-show season is back with a boom.

Southampton, England-based Tony Castro Yacht Design has an impressive and quite eye-catching portfolio, including several sailing sloops. Should the most recently designed one ever become a reality, ...

NASA has selected a fascinating new project for further development, known as the Diffractive Solar Sail. By bending light before it hits the sail, this device could propel spacecraft more efficiently ...

• New sail design replaces previous Mylar-encapsulated, wet-laid fiber tows with a monolithic laminate of prepreg tapes. • Anisotropic laminate architecture is replaced by a quasi-isotropic structure ...

Solar sails have long promised to harness sunlight for space exploration,just as early sailing ships harnessed the wind. Now the Planetary Society hopesto refit a NASA sail design and make a third U.S ...

French shipyard Chantiers de l’Atlantique is planning to construct cruise ships topped by striking 80 meter “eco-friendly” paneled sails, made of fiberglass and carbon. The Solid Sail/AeolDrive ...

Breakthrough Starshot plans to send microscopic probes to Alpha Centauri using lightsails. Previous conceptions of these structures have imagined them being passively pushed by light from the sun, but ...