First steps taken toward developing interstellar lightsails, ‘the lightsail will travel faster than any previous spacecraft’

For those looking at the Nature paywall linked in the article, don’t worry, [the paper is on arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00117).

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To my surprise, this actually does seem to be funded by Breakthrough Initiatives. I always wondered what was going on with that, because they went a bit quiet about Starshot after that initial high profile announcement. The last time the news section of their website mentioned Starshot was in their statement of condolences on the death of Steven Hawking…