LightSail is a follow-on project to Cosmos 1 — a solar-sail spacecraft designed by The Planetary Society in the early 2000s, which was destroyed during a launch failure in 2005.

[7] In 2005, The Planetary Society attempted to send a solar sail satellite named Cosmos 1 into space, but the spacecraft's Russian Volna launch vehicle failed to reach orbit.

[8] In 2009, the Society began working on a CubeSat-based solar sail based on NASA's NanoSail-D project,[9] which was lost in August 2008 due to the failure of its Falcon 1 launch vehicle.

In 2011, the LightSail project passed its Critical Design Review (CDR), which was conducted by a team including Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) project veterans Bud Schurmeier, Glenn Cunningham, and Viktor Kerzhanovich, as well as Dave Bearden of Aerospace Corporation.

As such, the design challenge was to maximize the surface area of the sail while minimizing the mass of the spacecraft — all while adhering to the standard 3-unit CubeSat size limitation.

One CubeSat-sized module carries the cameras, sensors and control systems, and the other two units contain and deploy the solar sails.

After launch, it enters an intermediate phase by deploying a small antenna and flipping open its solar panels.

[18][19] The mission delivered the satellite to an orbit where atmospheric drag was greater than the force exerted by solar radiation pressure.

[20] Two days after the launch, however, the spacecraft suffered a software malfunction, which made it unable to deploy the solar sail or to communicate.

[28][29] LightSail 2 (COSPAR 2019-036AC) was a CubeSat fitted with a solar sail the size of a boxing ring, covering 32 m2 (340 sq ft).

[36] Though initially planned to reenter Earth's atmosphere after approximately one year,[34] an extended mission was approved on 25 June 2020.