has been theorized as a means for space travel for decades but never put into practice, according to Louis Friedman, one of the society's co-founders and its current chief.
Friedman, who worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on solar-sail technology in the 1970s, said it might make interstellar flight possible much sooner than most scientists now estimate.
"Interstellar flight is an idea to us the way airplane flight was to [Leonardo] da Vinci: Hundreds of years into the future with no real way of knowing how to do it," Friedman said in a telephone interview from his Pasadena, California office.
"With [solar] sailing it may not be that far in the future," he said; rather than hundreds of years, such flights might be possible with this technology in 100 years.
The mission, called Cosmos 1, would begin with a suborbital test deployment of the solar sail in April and an orbital flight of several days, weeks or months toward the end of the year.
The craft would be visible to the naked eye from some places on Earth, but only as a bright dot in the sky.
The project is being funded by Cosmos Studios, a science entertainment venture run in part by Sagan's widow and longtime collaborator, Ann Druyan.
The mission does not aim to travel between the stars or even between the planets, but merely to show that the technology exists that could make this possible in the future, Friedman said.
Solar sailing is powerful enough to push spacecraft between the planets -- from Mercury out to Jupiter, the society said in its announcement. Beyond Jupiter, space sailing could be done using powerful lasers focused over long distances in space.
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