<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not the first time this has been tried. In 2016, the billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner announced an interstellar mission called Breakthrough Starshot to launch humanity\u2019s first spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. The plan was to use powerful lasers that would propel tiny probes to a fifth of the speed of light\u2014fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 years. Milner pledged $100 million toward a proof of concept. But a decade later, nothing has launched.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t want to do another Breakthrough Starshot,\u201d says Philip Johnston, the cofounder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission. \u201cWe\u2019re dead set on something actually launching.\u201d The new mission, currently funded by individual private donors, is expected to cost just $15 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To stick to that budget, \u201cwe are not constraining ourselves to doing it in a human lifetime,\u201d says Johnston. \u201cLet\u2019s just figure out the way to get to another star.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The spacecraft will carry cargo weighing at least one kilogram. That will include artistic and scientific payloads, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record, a gold-plated disc of Earth\u2019s sounds and images that NASA attached to its two Voyager probes in 1977 as a message to any civilization that might find them.<\/p>\n Engineering an interstellar journey is extremely difficult. Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles away from Earth. One of the fastest objects that humans have ever launched, the Voyager 1 probe, has been flying since 1977 and has covered less than 1% percent of that distance. At its speed, the trip would take more than 70,000 years.<\/p>\n Johnston and his team spent a year trying, and failing, to find a way for a small, solar-powered spacecraft costing only $15 million to reach Alpha Centauri. They kept running into the knotty problem of how to give the spacecraft enough power without making it too heavy (and thus more fuel-guzzling).\u00a0<\/p>\n After the Fermi team struggled to find a workable route, Johnston mentioned the problem in a podcast hosted by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who cofounded PSI. Wissner-Gross offered to run it through an AI system the lab developed, called Get Physics Done. It\u2019s open-source software that takes a physics research question, breaks it into smaller tasks, and decides which simulations to run, using AI models including Anthropic\u2019s Claude or OpenAI\u2019s GPT.<\/p>\n A week later, the AI system turned up a novel trajectory, to Johnston\u2019s surprise. It combined well-known orbital maneuvers in a way the Fermi team had not considered, according to a paper that has not been peer-reviewed. It suggested that the spacecraft could first slow down so its orbit swings in close to the sun\u2014closer than Mercury. On each close pass, it would fire its engine so that the solar panels get four times the light, and a burst of thrust delivered at high speed would buy more energy than the same burst anywhere else. Because the engine would run only near the sun, the solar panels could stay small and the spacecraft light.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n #plotted #interstellar #journey #Alpha #Centauri<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s not the first time this has been tried. In 2016, the billionaire tech investor…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[6126,13492,13491,7673,13490],"class_list":["post-21132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-alpha","tag-centauri","tag-interstellar","tag-journey","tag-plotted"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/centauri-route2-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}