The Fermi Explorer Mission, a nonprofit organization, today announced its intention to launch a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, our nearest star system, by the end of 2029. The journey, covering 4.4 light-years, could take up to 80,000 years. The mission's trajectory was discovered by an AI system called Get Physics Done, developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab that is launching today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy, a climate-focused investment group founded by Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
The mission avoids the pitfalls of previous attempts, such as the 2016 Breakthrough Starshot initiative by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner, which aimed to launch tiny probes to Alpha Centauri within 20 years using powerful lasers but has yet to launch a spacecraft. "We didn't want to do another Breakthrough Starshot," said Philip Johnston, cofounder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission. "We're dead set on something actually launching."
The spacecraft will carry cargo weighing at least one kilogram, including artistic and scientific payloads, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record, a gold-plated disc of Earth's sounds and images attached to NASA's Voyager probes in 1977. The mission is currently funded by individual private donors and is expected to cost $15 million.
Engineering an interstellar journey is extremely difficult. Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles from Earth; Voyager 1, one of the fastest objects launched by humans, has been flying since 1977 and has covered less than 1% of that distance, taking over 70,000 years to reach the star system at its speed. The Fermi team spent a year trying to find a way for a small, solar-powered spacecraft costing only $15 million to reach Alpha Centauri but kept running into the problem of providing enough power without making the spacecraft too heavy.
After Johnston mentioned the problem on a podcast hosted by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who cofounded PSI, Wissner-Gross offered to run it through Get Physics Done, an open-source AI system that takes a physics research question, breaks it into smaller tasks, and decides which simulations to run, using AI models such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's GPT. A week later, the AI system turned up a novel trajectory that combined well-known orbital maneuvers in a way the Fermi team had not considered, surprising Johnston.