A hit team of renowned scientists, Silicon Valley elites and a billionaire businessman have come together to launch a fleet of postage stamp-sized interstellar spacecraft.
Sounds like the pitch for a bad Bond movie, right? Well if it was, 007’d have his hands full.
Because this team includes scientist supreme, Dr. Stephen Hawking, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
All technology — including the camera — for the tiny interstellar spacecraft would be placed inside a postage-stamp-sized chip.
Called a starchip, this device would come with a light sail to form a nanocraft. This sail has a surface that would use Earth-based laser light to propel it along.
The lasers would come from a mile-wide laser array potentially situated 13,000 feet above sea level in the Atacama Desert in South America.
Using light energy from the 100 gigawatt laser array, the team plans to send a fleet of these nanocrafts to our closest star system, Alpha-Centauri.
If successful, a nanocraft could travel at 20 percent of the speed of light, or 134.2 million miles per hour, using laser light propulsion.
At that speed, a nanocraft could traverse the 25 trillion miles to Alpha Centauri in a matter of decades, while a current spacecraft would take thousands of years.
Dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, Milner has invested around $100 million in the nanocraft concept.
However, it will still potentially cost billions and could take up to 30 years to get a swarm of the devices into space if the concept is shown to be successful.
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