In the summer of 2012, the 1,592-pound space probe Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to exit our solar system. NASA had launched the probe in 1977; the multi-billion-mile trek to the edge of ...

Reaching interstellar space could be far simpler than we thought, thanks to a new idea called TARS, or "Torqued Accelerator using Radiation from the Sun." It's essentially a solar-powered centrifuge ...