"With our current technology, solar sails are capable of taking you anywhere in the solar system," says Sandy Montgomery, a Technology Manager for NASA's Solar Sails program at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Last summer, he and a team successfully tested a prototype in a vacuum chamber, but he looks forward to testing the gossamerlike sails in the real conditions of the laboratory of space.

"NASA's first science mission for solar sails is called HelioStorm, with a launch date in 2016," says Montgomery. Plans are for the craft to use sunlight to hover in place like a helicopter and stay halfway between the earth and the sun to study the sun's weather system, which affects communications on Earth. The current design calls for the HelioStorm sail to be as long as a football field, twice as wide, and superthin. Forty of them piled on top of one another would only be as thick as a piece of paper. The supporting poles would be made of the kind of lightweight composites used for tennis rackets and golf clubs.

One private group of space enthusiasts is not waiting for government timetables for space sailing. In June 2005, the Planetary Society, a worldwide advocacy group for space exploration, funded and built its own design for a solar sail and spacecraft, the Cosmos 1. But their first-ever solar sail spacecraft never had a chance to show off. A faulty rocket launch from a submarine interrupted the bold experiment. The society is already working on raising funds for another attempt.

WITH THE ENTERPRISE of entrepreneurs, the passion of private citizens, financial prizes, and return-to-the-moon agendas, we are reaching back to a dream as old as the early stargazers - to go beyond Earth. And we are reaching forward with new kinds of rockets, elevators, sails, and imagination.