US plan aims to send tiny spaceships to Alpha Centauri

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced Tuesday a $100 million proposal to send tiny spacecraft 40 trillion kilometers (25 trillion miles) away from Earth within two decades.

The nanocraft would weigh only one gram and be powered by the sun to reach speeds close to 20 percent of the speed of light, far swifter than any current transportation technology.

It would be sent toward Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth at 4.37 light years away. Upon arrival, the spacecraft would capture images and collect data of distant space objects, information that could be transmitted back to Earth.

The team behind the proposal would particularly want to collect data about Earth-like exoplanets, which are roughly as close to their home stars as the Earth is to the sun.

Hawking and Milner announced the Breakthrough Starshot project at the One World Observatory in New York City, adding that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is also attached to the initiative.

Breakthrough Starshot will be led by Pete Worden, the director of NASA's AMES Research Center in Northern California from 2006 to 2015.

Current spacecraft would take 30 millennia to reach Alpha Centauri. The Breakthrough Starshot nanocraft could reach the system “within a generation,” Hawking told reporters.

The proposed craft could reach Pluto within a few days instead of the nearly nine years NASA’s New Horizon probe required.

"Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos," Hawking said. "Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

Milner, who became a billionaire after founding tech companies in his home country of Russia, noted that the nanocraft would use sail-like appendages to propel them to distant realms.

"For the first time in human history we can do more than just gaze at the stars," Milner said. "We can actually reach them."