The founders behind Starcloud, a startup with plans to operate a fleet of GPUs in orbit, have a new pitch for potential investors: a plan to send a tiny spacecraft on an 80,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri.
If they do it, it will be the first human-built object explicitly aimed for another star, and the sixth to leave our solar system.
Dubbed Fermi Explorer, the non-profit behind the mission emerged today to ask for partners, donations, and advice. The initial team — Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, along with program manager Garret Jameson — has put together a plan to use proven space technologies to send a vehicle with a 10 cm square payload, weighing 1 kilogram, into interstellar space.
The founders say they are launching this mission in the spirit of human exploration; to achieve a historical first; and to test the limits of the Fermi paradox, which attempts to explain why we have yet to find other intelligent life in the universe and gives the mission its name.
The mission is intended to cost about $15 million and plans to launch in 2029. The non-profit is soliciting vendors to build the vehicle, funding to pay them, and scientific and artistic payloads to send, à la the sensors and Golden Record onboard NASA’s Voyager space probe, the first human spacecraft to leave our solar system.
