The founders behind star cloudA startup with plans to operate a fleet of GPUs in orbit has a new proposal for potential investors: a plan to send a small spacecraft on an 80,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri.
If they do, it will be the first human-built object explicitly aimed at another star and the sixth to leave our solar system.
Nicknamed Fermi ExplorerThe nonprofit behind the mission emerged today to solicit 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 payload of 10 square cm and a weight of 1 kilogram into interstellar space.
The founders say they are launching this mission in the spirit of human exploration; achieve a historic first; and test the limits of fermi paradoxwhich attempts to explain why we have yet to find other intelligent life in the universe, and gives the mission its name.
The mission is expected to cost about $15 million and launch in 2029. The nonprofit is soliciting vendors to build the vehicle, funding to pay them, and scientific and artistic payloads to send, among others, the sensors and the Golden Record aboard NASA’s Voyager space probe, the first human spacecraft to leave our solar system.
Most interstellar exploration plans stumble when addressing the enormous distances involved and the comparatively slow methods we have for crossing them. Voyager, launched in 1977, is now about 26 billion kilometers from Earth; Alpha Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, is 41 trillion kilometers away.
The last time Silicon Valley took on this challenge, a nonprofit called Breakthrough Starshot, founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner and backed by Mark Zuckerberg, envisioned a multibillion-dollar effort to use a novel laser-based propulsion system to reach Alpha Centauri in twenty to thirty years. the effort collapsed in 2025but the dream apparently lives on.
Fermi Explorer takes the opposite tack: Instead of pushing the frontier of technology, the goal is to use what we already have to do. something.
“I was excited too and then I was disappointed!” Johnston said of Starshot. “That’s why we’re doing the mission. We’re committed to launching something in three years… the big difference from most of the others [interstellar] missions and the Fermi Explorer is that everyone else is trying to do it in a human lifetime, which means billion-dollar propulsion R&D programs. “We have very deliberately chosen 80,000 years as the minimum viable mission.”
The plan is to launch the spacecraft on a rideshare rocket and then use efficient but low-power electric propulsion to launch the vehicle into a series of orbits that will eventually leave it bound for Alpha Centauri. The spacecraft is planned to be active for about 12 years before entering a final coastal phase toward the other solar system.
“If a dinosaur bone can last 200 million years, then a metal case can easily survive the radiation environment we expect for 50,000 years,” Johnston said. “We do not plan to power spacecraft at the end of 80,000 years. We hope that a future human civilization will intercept them.”
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