posted 04-12-2016 12:00 PM               

Breakthrough Starshot Project to Develop 100 Million Mile per Hour Mission to the Stars within a Generation

$100 million research and engineering program will seek proof of concept for using light beam to propel gram-scale 'nanocraft' to 20 percent of light speed. A possible fly-by mission could reach Alpha Centauri within about 20 years of its launch.

Internet investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner was joined at One World Observatory today by renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking to announce a new Breakthrough Initiative focusing on space exploration and the search for life in the Universe.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocrafts. These could fly at 20 percent of light speed and capture images of possible planets and other scientific data in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, just over 20 years after their launch.

The program will be led by Pete Worden, the former director of NASA AMES Research Center, and advised by a committee of world-class scientists and engineers. The board will consist of Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Ann Druyan, Freeman Dyson, Mae Jemison, Avi Loeb and Pete Worden also participated in the announcement.

Today, on the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space flight, and nearly half a century after the original 'moonshot', Breakthrough Starshot is launching preparations for the next great leap: to the stars.

Breakthrough Starshot

The Alpha Centauri star system is 25 trillion miles (4.37 light years) away. With today's fastest spacecraft, it would take about 30,000 years to get there. Breakthrough Starshot aims to establish whether a gram-scale nanocraft, on a sail pushed by a light beam, can fly over a thousand times faster. It brings the Silicon Valley approach to space travel, capitalizing on exponential advances in certain areas of technology since the beginning of the 21st century.

1. Nanocrafts

   Nanocrafts are gram-scale robotic spacecrafts comprising two main parts:

   StarChip: Moore's law has allowed a dramatic decrease in the size of microelectronic components. This creates the possibility of a gram-scale wafer, carrying cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment, and constituting a fully functional space probe.

   Lightsail: Advances in nanotechnology are producing increasingly thin and light-weight metamaterials, promising to enable the fabrication of meter-scale sails no more than a few hundred atoms thick and at gram-scale mass.

2. Light Beamer

   The rising power and falling cost of lasers, consistent with Moore's law, lead to significant advances in light beaming technology. Meanwhile, phased arrays of lasers (the 'light beamer') could potentially be scaled up to the 100 gigawatt level.

Breakthrough Starshot aims to bring economies of scale to the astronomical scale. The StarChip can be mass-produced at the cost of an iPhone and be sent on missions in large numbers to provide redundancy and coverage. The light beamer is modular and scalable. Once it is assembled and the technology matures, the cost of each launch is expected to fall to a few hundred thousand dollars.

Path to the stars

The research and engineering phase is expected to last a number of years. Following that, development of the ultimate mission to Alpha Centauri would require a budget comparable to the largest current scientific experiments, and would involve:

• Building a ground-based kilometer-scale light beamer at high altitude in dry conditions

• Generating and storing a few gigawatt hours of energy per launch

• Launching a 'mothership' carrying thousands of nanocrafts to a high-altitude orbit

• Taking advantage of adaptive optics technology in real time to compensate for atmospheric effects

• Focusing the light beam on the lightsail to accelerate individual nanocrafts to the target speed within minutes

• Accounting for interstellar dust collisions en route to the target

• Capturing images of a planet, and other scientific data, and transmitting them back to Earth using a compact on-board laser communications system

• Using the same light beamer that launched the nanocrafts to receive data from them over 4 years later.

These and other system requirements represent significant engineering challenges, and they can be reviewed in more detail online. However, the key elements of the proposed system design are based on technology either already available or likely to be attainable in the near future under reasonable assumptions.

The proposed light propulsion system is on a scale significantly exceeding any currently operational analog. The very nature of the project calls for global co-operation and support.

Clearance for launches would be required from all the appropriate government and international organizations.

Additional opportunities

As the technology required for interstellar travel matures, a number of additional opportunities will emerge, including the following:

• Contribution to solar system exploration.

• Using the light beamer as a kilometer-scale telescope for astronomical observations.

• Detection of Earth-crossing asteroids at large distances.

Potential Planets in the Alpha Centauri system

Astronomers estimate that there is a reasonable chance of an Earth-like planet existing in the 'habitable zones' of Alpha Centauri's three-star system. A number of scientific instruments, ground-based and space-based, are being developed and enhanced, which will soon identify and characterize planets around nearby stars.

A separate Breakthrough Initiative will support some of these projects.

Open and collaborative environment

The Breakthrough Starshot initiative is:

• based entirely on research that is in the public domain.

• committed to publishing new results.

• dedicated to full transparency and open access.

• open to experts in all relevant fields, as well as the public, to contribute ideas through its online forum.

Research support

The Breakthrough Starshot initiative will establish a research grant program, and will make available other funding to support relevant scientific and engineering research and development.

posted 04-14-2016 12:49 PM               

Popular Science: Why are you doing this?

People have been thinking about interstellar travel for a long time. The first one who proposed to do it by sail was actually [German astronomer Johannes] Kepler, in a letter to Galileo in 1610. At the time, we did not know how to do it. But after the Second World War, different scientists were thinking about it, and different options were considered. A sail was one, and fusion and antimatter, and others. But it was assumed that this is centuries away.

What changed the equation was the weight of the spaceship. We can make one that weighs a few grams and that has sails. In the last 15 years, everything has shrunk in microelectronics. Communication equipment, navigation equipment, cameras, processing power, thrusters. You can have tiny thrusters on it.

posted 04-14-2016 06:49 PM               

The item that to me was the kicker to the project was his statement that in order to truly get it up and running (say, starting about 15 to 20 years from now), governments would have to kick in funding to the extent of the largest scientific projects currently created. He went on to talk about CERN. In other words, this is a project that will ultimately need to be government funded.

While I think that it's good to have billionaires and theoreticians working on this project, I personally would not want any significant portion of my (scientific funding) tax dollars spent on this project.

In 15 to 20 years from now, theoretically NASA will be ready to start going to Mars. That is where I want my (scientific funding) tax dollars to go. Going to Mars is eminently feasible, and the short and medium term benefits in going there, in my opinion, far outweigh funding a billionaire's toy. After all, if the project is that important to him and Zuckerberg, they can fund it to a significantly higher degree than $100,000,000.

posted 01-10-2017 06:50 PM               

The ESO said it has signed a deal with Breakthrough Starshot, a venture that aims to deploy thousands of tiny spacecraft to travel to the system and send back pictures.

Starshot, which is backed by internet billionaire Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking, will provide funding to allow equipment on the Very Large Telescope that studies in the mid-infrared to be adapted to better detect faint planets, the ESO said in a statement on Monday.

The adaption will have the effect of reducing bright stellar light that drowns out relatively dim planets, improving the chances of finding them, it said.

posted 07-26-2017 10:15 AM               

In Quest to Reach Alpha Centauri, Breakthrough Starshot Launches World's Smallest Spacecraft

First Prototype 'Sprites' – Precursors to Eventual 'StarChip' Probes – Achieve Low Earth Orbit

Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-faceted program to develop and launch practical interstellar space missions, successfully flew its first spacecraft -- the smallest ever launched.

On June 23, a number of prototype "Sprites" – the world's smallest fully functional space probes, built on a single circuit board -- achieved Low Earth Orbit, piggybacking on OHB System AG's 'Max Valier' and 'Venta' satellites. The 3.5-by-3.5 centimeterchips weigh just four grams but contain solar panels, computers, sensors, and radios. These vehicles are the next step of a revolution in spacecraft miniaturization that can contribute to the development of centimeter- and gram-scale "StarChips" envisioned by the Breakthrough Starshot project.

The Sprite is the brainchild of Breakthrough Starshot's Zac Manchester, whose 2011 Kickstarter campaign, "KickSat," raised the first funds to develop the concept. The Sprites were constructed by researchers at Cornell University and transported into space as secondary payloads by the Max Valier and Venta satellites, the latter built by the Bremen-based OHB System AG, whose generous assistance made the mission possible.

The Sprites remain attached to the satellites. Communications received from the mission show the Sprite system performing as designed. The spacecraft are in radio communication with ground stations in California and New York, as well as with amateur radio enthusiasts around the world. This mission is designed to test how well the Sprites' electronics perform in orbit, and demonstrates their novel radio communication architecture.

posted 05-09-2018 11:25 AM               

...much of Breakthrough Starshot's early funding has gone to figuring out what improvements on current technology are needed.

Perhaps the least well-understood developments we need come in the form of the light sail that will be needed to accelerate the starshots to 20 percent of the speed of light. We've only put two examples of light-driven sails into space, and they aren't anything close to what is necessary for Breakthrough Starshot. So, in this week's edition of Nature Materials, a team of Caltech scientists looks at what we'd need to do to go from those examples to something capable of interstellar travel.

posted 04-15-2021 09:55 AM               

Alpha Centauri was the 2021 conference’s main theme, which makes sense considering that one of Breakthrough’s goals is to send a mission to our neighboring star system within the next generation.