The Technology That Will Make Voyager Look Ancient

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]NASA's fastest spacecraft would need 73,000 years to reach the nearest star, but a laser sail being built right now could do it in just 20 years. We're talking about Breakthrough Starshot, and it's not science fiction anymore. It's actively being funded and [music] developed. Here's the wild part. Instead of using rockets like we've been doing for the last 100 years, this thing uses a 100 gigawatt ground-based laser array to literally push a tiny [music] spacecraft across space.

[00:00:27]Think of it like surfing on light itself.

[00:00:29]>> [music] >> The craft is the size of a postage stamp, weighing just a few grams, but that's exactly why it works. It's so light that the laser can accelerate it to 20% the speed of light. That's 134 million [music] miles per hour. At that speed, you could cross the entire solar system in weeks.

[00:00:45]Voyager 1, humanity's greatest achievement in space exploration, suddenly looks like it's moving in slow motion.

[00:00:52]The age of chemical rockets that we've relied on since the 1950s is about to become completely obsolete, [music] replaced by something so elegant and simple that it seems impossible it took us this long to figure it out.