The Planetary Society’s first experiment in sailing through space on a beam of light was reinvigorated when contact was reestablished Saturday with its satellite. Some feared the worst when contact with the CubeSat spacecraft terminated.

The satellite launched on an enormous Atlas V rocket earlier this month from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A schedule for the mission as the 35-square-meter Mylar unfurling June 17th but that date could change. The sail should be visible in the sky with a naked eye during dawn and dusk.

Inspired by the late Carl Sagan, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, the experiment will test if indeed the pressure exerted by trillions of photons will actually push enough against the sail and attached satellite to move them along.

Photons do not have mass, but they do have momentum, and sunlight shining on anything actually gives that object a minuscule—but measurable—push. The theory is that the accumulated energy will be enough to create locomotion. Such a technology was originally put forward a century ago.

Bill Nye, the Chief Executive Officer of The Planetary Society, exclaimed in a statement that “It’s alive!” He confirmed that the spacecraft carrying the LightSail did indeed reboot itself “just as our engineers predicted.”

That the LightSail project uses the sun as a source of propulsion “has a certain romance to it,” said The Planetary Society board member Neil DeGrasse Tyson. “Traversing vast distances of space in a relatively short amount of time are possible,” he said.

“Solar sailing can take us to the moon, to other planets and even to interstellar space,” said Doug Stetson, LightSail’s program manager.

A portion of funding for the project has come from a campaign on the crowd-sourcing website, KickStarter.