A small group of businessmen and scientists want to demonstrate that traveling to another star does not necessarily require developing revolutionary technology or having a budget of billions. The project, called Fermi Explorerintends to launch a small probe towards Alpha Centaurithe star system closest to ours and located about 40 billion kilometersusing currently available systems and with a budget of about 15 million dollarsas explained by Ars Technica.
The proposal is based on Philip JohnstonBritish mathematician and physicist who in 2024 co-founded starclouda company dedicated to the development of orbital data centers and currently valued at about $2.3 billion. While working on expanding that company, Johnston also wants to check How difficult is it really for a civilization to send a ship beyond its star system?.
The Fermi Paradox
This approach is related to the call Fermi paradoxwhich starts from an apparently simple contradiction. If there are billions of planets in our galaxy and many stars have worlds located in areas where life could appear, one would expect that some technological civilization would have left detectable signals or sent probes to other systems. However, so far we have found no evidence that this has occurred.
One of the possible explanations is that there are certain ‘filters’ that prevent civilizations from reaching that point. Fermi Explorer aims to test two of them. The first maintains that an advanced species could have no interest in sending ships beyond their own star. The second suggests that interstellar travel is simply too difficult or expensive to carry out.
If a small group manages to send a probe to Alpha Centauri using conventional technology and for 15 million dollars, These two obstacles would be less convincing as an explanation for the silence of the universe.. Other possibilities would remain, such as technological civilizations being extremely rare or disappearing before spreading throughout the galaxy.
How to get to Alpha Centauri in 77,000 years
The main technical problem with Fermi Explorer is achieving sufficient speed. The ship would basically have a xenon tank, solar panels, an electric propulsion system and a scientific payload of around one kilogram. After traveling as a secondary payload of another launch to low Earth orbit, a series of maneuvers intended to progressively approach the Sun.
For a few twelve years would reduce its perihelion, which is the point in the orbit closest to the Sun, from approximately the distance of the Earth to about 0.42 astronomical units. In each approach it would take advantage of the increase in energy received by the solar panels to power its electric motors, which would expel xenon particles at high speed and provide a small but continuous push.
The ship would also take advantage of the Oberth effectwhich allows more energy to be obtained from a powered maneuver when the vehicle is already moving very fast. By firing the engines near the Sun, where their orbital speed would be greatest, each impulse would have a more significant effect on his escape path.
After approximately twelve years of maneuvers, the probe would leave the solar system at about 25 kilometers per second, about 90,000 km/h. From that moment on, the engines would no longer be relevant to the trip. Fermi Explorer would continue virtually by inertia, following a ballistic trajectory for about 77,000 years until reaching Alpha Centauri.
The flight profile emerged after Johnston contacted Alex Wissner-Grossphysicist and founder of artificial intelligence company Physical Superintelligence. The team fed the mission parameters into their AI system, which generated an 18-page technical feasibility analysis with this proposed trajectory.
‘So we thought, fuck it, let’s send a spacecraft for as little money as possible, a minimally viable and completely conventional mission to Alpha Centauri‘Johnston told Ars Technica.
Those responsible for Fermi Explorer want to obtain the necessary financing and launch the mission in 2029. Contact with the probe would last only a few 18 months and then it could only be followed for a time by terrestrial telescopes, without the possibility of confirming from Earth if it finally reaches its destination.