150-Year Journey to Alpha Centauri Proposed [Video]

[rangerrebew]

150-Year Journey to Alpha Centauri Proposed [Video]

Humanity possesses the means to place probes into orbit around nearby stars. But do we have the patience?

    By Lee Billings on February 4, 2017

 
This artist's concept illustrates an interstellar probe—a giant light sail—approaching the potentially habitable planet Proxima b in our nearest neighboring star system Alpha Centauri. A new study suggests that such a sail could launch from Earth to reach and enter orbit around the nearest stars on a timescale of centuries. Credit: PHL/UPR Arecibo/Abel Mendez

Interstellar travel, a timeworn staple of science fiction, can already be science fact if one has cash to spare. For just $100 million or so, a customer could actually purchase a top-of-the-line commercial rocket and ride right out of the solar system. But patience would be key. If launched tomorrow toward the nearest port of call—Proxima b, a potentially habitable Earth-mass planet recently discovered in the triple star system of Alpha Centauri about four light-years away—that rocket would take 80,000 years to arrive.

Instead of spending $100 million on a slow boat to the stars, in April of last year the billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced he would use that same sum to forge a new path to Alpha Centauri within a human lifetime. Called Breakthrough Starshot, the initiative calls for largely abandoning rockets in favor of “light sails”—gossamer-thin reflective sheets that, once unfolded in space, could be propelled to very high speeds by laser beams. Starshot’s tentative plans involve using conventional rockets to place thousands of one-gram, four-meter-wide light sails in Earth orbit as early as the 2040s. Each sail would be embedded with a one-centimeter-wide chip containing cameras, sensors, thrusters and a battery. From Earth orbit, each featherweight spacecraft would be boosted toward Alpha Centauri at 20 percent light-speed by a minutes-long pulse from a ground-based, 100-gigawatt laser array. The interstellar crossing would take just a little over 20 years, so the probes could reach Alpha Centauri in the 2060s.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/150-year-journey-to-alpha-centauri-proposed-video/

[Suppressed]

So, when you read the details, we're talking launch in AD 2115, arrival AD 2265. 

[Doug Loss]

Better reads on this topic:

By ‘Photogravitational Assists’ to Proxima b

Proxima Centauri: The Problem of Arrival

[Cripplecreek]

The first probes sent to Alpha C will be flyby probes for the same reason New Horizons isn't in orbit around Pluto today.

[geronl]

The first probes sent to Alpha C will be flyby probes for the same reason New Horizons isn't in orbit around Pluto today.

I think so too.

[LateForLunch]

Risk/cost v. return should be the gauge for space engineering expenditures.

There are those who, just as they exploit public and government credulity on AGW in order to inflate their funding for "research", would love to exploit the old trope that "pure science research is consistently rewarding", even though that is less and less true in the age of computers/robots.

I'm not sure that there really is a justification for the massive cost of such a project, especially since it is likely that it would fail to achieve any of its primary objectives. We would very well be throwing away innocent lives and incredibly large financial resources for something that would likely have little or no significant scientific payoff.

The crew would never return nor be able to communicate with Earth because even if they got to where they were going, once they did, all of their resources and energy would likely be expended on trying to stay alive. They couldn't build or power an interstellar communications system, much less refuel or construct a ship for a return trip.

So it sounds like a stupid idea to me at this point. Might as well throw all of the money, resources and lives down into a bottomless pit with the same net results.