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 If successful, scientists could determine if Alpha Centauri, a
star system about 25 trillion miles away, contains an Earth-like
planet capable of sustaining life.
The catch: It could take years to develop the project, dubbed
Breakthrough Starshot, and there is no guarantee it will work.
Tuesday’s announcement, made with cosmologist Stephen Hawking, comes
less than a year after the announcement of Breakthrough Listen. That
decade-long, $100 million project, also backed by Milner, monitors
radio signals for signs of intelligent life across the universe.
Breakthrough Starshot involves deploying small light-propelled
vehicles to carry equipment like cameras and communication
equipment. Scientists hope the vehicles, known as nanocraft, will
eventually fly at 20 percent of the speed of light, more than a
thousand times faster than today’s spacecraft.
 “The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this
very thin gauzy light sail,” said Pete Worden, the former director
of NASA’s Ames Research Center, who is leading the project. “It
would be something like 10, 12 feet across.”
He envisions sending a larger conventional spacecraft containing
thousands of nanocraft into orbit, and then launching the nanocraft
one by one, he said in an interview.
The idea has precedents with mixed results. Two years ago, Cornell
University's KickSat fizzled after the craft carrrying 104
micro-satellites into space failed to release them. The plan was to
let the tiny satellites orbit and collect data for a few weeks.
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Worden acknowledges challenges, including the nanocraft surviving
impact on launch. They would then endure 20 years of travel through
the punishing environment of interstellar space, with obstacles such
as dust collisions.
“The problems remaining to be solved - any one of them are
showstoppers,” Worden said.
Governments likely would not take on the research due to its
speculative nature, he said, yet the technology is promising enough
to merit pursuing.
If the nanocraft reach the star system and succeed in taking
photographs, it would take about another four years to transmit them
back to Earth.
A onetime physics PhD student in Moscow who dropped out to move to
the United States in 1990, Milner is one of a handful of technology
tycoons devoting time and money to space exploration. He is known
for savvy investments, including in social network Facebook Inc and
Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi.
(Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Tom Brown)
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