Solar Sailing: a new sport for 2100?

Nature is reporting on an interesting non-military missile launch from a Russian submarine in April:

In April, if all goes to plan, a 600-square-metre Mylar sail called Cosmos 1, which looks more like a windmill than a starship, will prove that a spacecraft can be propelled by sunlight alone.

First, though, it will have to be launched into orbit on a converted missile from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. Cosmos 1 is privately funded by the Planetary Society, a US space-advocacy group based in Pasadena, California, which Friedman heads, but it was built in Moscow by the ex-Soviet aerospace company NPO Lavochkin.

After the sail reaches its initial 800-kilometre orbit and unfolds its eight triangular vanes, ground controllers will tilt the vanes like sailors feeling for the wind. A slight boost to the spacecraft's orbit is all they need to demonstrate propulsion by light pressure. It may take a few days, but the Cosmos team won't mind waiting.

It may not be the fast way to go, but it's another one of those old SF ideas that we might soon be accepting as commonplace. . .