T+0 · Stage 1 raise
A laser rail to the stars, built one satellite at a time.
Fuel-less sail probes, pushed outward by a chain of solar-powered laser stations instead of one giant laser. Stations go up a few per launch and are dropped off outward from the Sun. Each rung of the build produces flight data.
Stage 1$25M4 years3 launches
01 / The problem
Sixty years of proposals. The same wall every time.
Laser sails have been proposed since the 1960s. The physics has been accepted since Forward's 1984 paper. Nobody disputes the equations.
Every design since has asked for one enormous laser or lens. Hundreds of kilometres of optics, gigawatts on day one.
Every attempt died on the same two things: scale and the cheque that had to be written before any data existed.
02 / The concept
The rail.
Instead of one laser holding focus across light-years, a chain of stations passes the probe along. Power stations sit near Mercury's orbit, at roughly 0.3 AU, where sunlight is about seven times stronger than at Earth. Relay stations along the outward track, big but light, hundreds of metres across and a few tonnes each, keep the beam focused. A probe sails inward on sunlight, whips around the Sun, and is pushed out from behind. The same sail does the braking and the flying: no propellant.
The probe sails inward on sunlight, the same sail, no propellant. Leaving Earth it carries Earth's 30 km/s orbital speed and must shed about 17 km/s to drop its perihelion to 0.1 AU. A 1 kg probe with a 22 m sail feels sunlight at about three-quarters of the Sun's gravity, so it brakes against its orbit on sunlight alone. Projected: 2–4 months of sailing, then 74 days of fall.
It rounds the Sun at 0.1 AU, close to the power stations, already moving fast. Projected: about 11 days inside 0.25 AU, up to 127 km/s. At 0.1 AU the sail runs at roughly 600–1,050 K (projection); silicon nitride melts above 1,900 K.
Stations behind it fire in turn along the outbound leg. Each keeps the probe close enough that its optics stay far smaller than one giant laser's. Projected: 8.5 hours on the rail to 10% of light speed.
Projection About six months from launch to the start of the 43-year cruise.
How it gets built.
Solar collectors and lasers near Mercury's orbit, about 0.3 AU, where sunlight is about 7× stronger. One dedicated heavy-lift launch each. Reaching Mercury's orbit is the hard part: MESSENGER and BepiColombo needed 6–7 years of planetary flybys. Ours can sail inward on their own collector membranes, or use Venus flybys.
Their size is set by geometry, not power. To hold the beam on a 22 m sail across a 0.1 AU gap, each needs a membrane optic about 700 m across. At a few grams per square metre that is 1–10 tonnes apiece Projection. A single carrier launched outward drops 4–10 of them as it goes. Each settles into its own orbit using its membrane as a solar sail.
Light enough to sail out of Earth orbit on sunlight. The cheapest launch in the program is the one that leaves for another star.
Projection About 30 stations. Roughly 10–15 launches. Not 30.
Why a rail, not a laser
A single laser has to hold focus over light-years. That needs a lens or aperture hundreds of kilometres wide. A chain keeps the probe near the last station that pushed it, so every station's optics stay far smaller than a single laser's would.
Why it can be built incrementally
Power stations get a heavy-lift launch each. Relay stations are big but light, hundreds of metres across and a few tonnes, and a single carrier drops several of them off outward from the Sun. The first rung is a lab bench. The second is one cubesat. Each rung produces data the next rung is priced on.
03 / Why now
Three things changed.
A Delft team hit a 4 mm silicon-nitride sail with a 230 W laser at 0.3 GW/m² and measured about 100 g of acceleration. The sail material question is largely answered.
Sun-synchronous orbit at $350k for up to 50 kg, and $7k per kilogram above that. Laser-communication pointing hardware is commodity. A Stage 1 rung is a smallsat, not a program.
The one funded laser-sail program has been on indefinite hold since about 2023, with most of its pledged $100M never delivered. No one is flying this.
Never done, in sixty years of proposals: a laser pushing a free-flying sail in space, and one station handing a sail to the next. The rail depends on both. Both are cheap.
04 / Physics in one line
Thrust on a reflective sail is 2P/c.
It scales linearly. A kilowatt in orbit and a gigawatt on the rail obey the same line, so kilowatt flight data is direct evidence for a gigawatt rail, not an analogy.
05 / Stage 1
The ladder.
Four rungs, each with a numeric pass/fail metric, a cost band, and a timeline. Stage 1 is about $20–25M over roughly four years. First flight data arrives at about $3M.
A sail under a 1 kW beam in vacuum.
Proves the sail survives the beam intensity and the force matches the equation.
- Success metric
- Survives ≥60 s at ≥0.1 GW/m². Reflectivity ≥95%. Measured force within 20% of prediction.
- Cost
- $0.2–1M
- Timeline
- 6–12 months
Pointing at range, no sail.
One 12U cubesat holds a 1–10 W laser on a released retroreflector out to about 100 km.
- Success metric
- On target ≥90% of a pass at 10 km, ≥50% at 100 km. Cold acquisition under 60 s.
- Cost
- $2–4M
- Timeline
- 18–24 months
First laser push of a free-flying sail in space.
An ESPA-class smallsat with a 1 kW fibre laser fires 9-minute battery bursts in Earth's shadow at a 10 g sail-craft with a 30 cm sail. Each burst adds 0.36 m/s, measured by Doppler ranging.
- Success metric
- ≥10 bursts within 30% of prediction. Sail reflectivity ≥90% afterward.
- Cost
- $8–12M
- Timeline
- 2–3 years
Handoff.
A second identical satellite 10–50 km away takes over the push. The first thing the rail needs that has never been done.
- Success metric
- Re-acquire within 60 s of cutoff. Cumulative Δv within 20% of the sum. ≥5 clean handoffs.
- Cost
- $6–9M
- Timeline
- +12–18 months
Stage 1 is three launches: one rideshare slot each for Rungs 1, 2 and 3.
06 / The deliverable
What $25M buys.
Bench, pointing, push, and handoff. Each with a numeric metric that was set before the money was spent.
A free-flying sail accelerated by a laser in orbit, measured by Doppler ranging. Not done in sixty years of proposals.
One station releases the sail and the next picks it up. This is the operation the whole rail is made of.
With the two never-done things done and the numbers in hand, the solar-powered megawatt station becomes an engineering estimate rather than a bet.
What it doesn't.
$25M does not build the rail, and it does not send a probe toward Alpha Centauri. It ends with a sail pushed by one satellite and handed to a second in low Earth orbit — the first two-station rail ever flown — plus the lab, pointing and thrust data. That is the evidence the next round needs.
$25M does not build the rail. It makes the rail fundable.
Cost ladder · order-of-magnitude projections
Proof
ProjectionOne solar-powered MW station
ProjectionMercury-orbit station and sun-dive probe
ProjectionThe rail, dominated by laser cost per watt
ProjectionStage 1 is roughly 0.1% of the program and retires the two risks no one has tested in space.
07 / Beyond Stage 1
Where it leads.
Everything in this section is a projection. It is what the physics and the current cost of hardware allow, not a commitment.
A solar-powered megawatt station.
The first heavy station: solar-powered, megawatt-class beam, placed inward from Earth. It proves the power-station design the rail is made of.
The rail.
About 30 stations from 0.3 to 3 AU: solar power stations near Mercury's orbit and relay stations trailing outward, dropped off several per carrier launch.
A probe to Alpha Centauri.
A 1 kg probe with a 22 m sail at 100 g of acceleration, pushed by the full rail. Projected figures based on 2P/c and the Stage 4 station count.
For scale: Voyager 1 has been flying for 49 years and is 171 AU from the Sun, moving at 16.9 km/s. It is the most distant human-made object ever built. Distance as of September 2026.
Coming off the rail at 30,000 km/s, the probe is travelling about 1,780 times faster than Voyager 1.
It passes Voyager 1's current distance roughly ten days after the push ends.
08 / What we get
What we get.
Alpha Centauri.
The nearest star system, about 4.3 light-years away. Three stars: two Sun-like stars, A and B, orbiting each other, and Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf at 4.24 light-years, the nearest star of all. Proxima has a confirmed roughly Earth-mass planet in its habitable zone, Proxima b, on an 11-day orbit, and a smaller confirmed planet, Proxima d.
In August 2024 JWST imaged a candidate Saturn-to-Jupiter-mass planet about 2 AU from Alpha Centauri A. It is still unconfirmed and awaiting follow-up. Aug 2024 observation; 2025 analysis. Source.
It is the closest place with a possibly habitable world to look at.
What a 1 kg flyby at 10% of light speed returns.
The probe cannot stop. It crosses the Sun–Earth distance in 83 minutes, so the science at the target lasts hours.
Tens to hundreds of km per pixel from a 10 cm camera, depending on approach distance. Any telescope gives a single pixel for the foreseeable future.
Water, oxygen, methane. The biosignature question.
Whether the planet has a magnetic field, the make-or-break for habitability around a flaring red dwarf.
Measured in place, at the star.
And for the entire cruise: the first sustained sampling of the interstellar medium beyond the Sun's bubble. Voyager only touched its edge.
Data comes home at bits to kilobits per second, using the sail itself as the antenna. The signal takes 4.2 years. First images arrive roughly 48 years after launch.
The same rail, closer to home.
Run at lower speed, the same rail delivers probes across the solar system in days.
At 1% of light speed.
At 1% of light speed. New Horizons took 9½ years.
Fast flyby probes to the outer planets and the interstellar boundary are the near-term product. Alpha Centauri is the proof that the rail reaches beyond the solar system at all.
09 / Risks we're not hiding
What could stop this.
Sail limits at gigawatt beams
Delft's result is at Starshot-class intensity on a 4 mm sample. Metre-scale sails under gigawatt beams are a lab problem that is progressing, not a solved one. Rung 0 is where we find out on our own hardware.
Power-station cost at Stage 4
The financing cliff. Stage 1 costs tens of millions; the full rail costs far more. Stage 1 data exists to make the next cheque fundable on evidence, not on a slide.
Orbital shear
Stations at different solar distances orbit at different rates. The rail is not a straight line; it is a network that lines up in launch windows. That is a scheduling constraint we design around, not a physics objection.
10 / Standing on prior work
The physics is forty years old. The build plan is not.
A solar laser near Mercury and a 1,000 km lens near Saturn. The physics has stood for forty years; the scale was judged absurd.
Stations in a line. NASA NIAC Phase I. Never funded past the bench.
One 100 GW ground array. Funding never arrived.
Solar-pumped stations firing in succession, 10 g probe to 7.7% of light speed.
What is new here is the incremental build, so that partial funding buys real flight data, and the sun-dive-then-push geometry.
11 / Team
Who is building it.
Mike Taylor
12 / Stage 1 · $25M
Partner with us.
We are raising $25M for Stage 1 from investors and philanthropic funders who want to see the first laser push of a sail in space, and the first handoff, measured and published. First flight data at about $3M.