“For the first time in human history, we can do more than just gaze at the stars,” declared philanthropist and high-tech entrepreneur Yuri Milner on April 12. “We can actually reach them.”
Milner, a Russian native, was named after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who exactly 55 years earlier became the first man in space and the first to orbit Earth. Milner was hoping to bring another historic first to fruition. At a press conference held atop New York City’s One World Trade Center, he unveiled Breakthrough Starshot, a program with a bold agenda: to launch, within 20 years, a fleet of spacecraft that would within another 20 years reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light-years away.
Milner wasn’t just talking a good game; he was backing it with his own money, $100 million in research and development funding to demonstrate the feasibility of this wild idea. It might take another $10 billion to pull off the actual mission, but the main point Milner stressed during the press conference was that such an endeavor is within our grasp, assuming reasonable improvements in existing technology.
He also brought along some heavy hitters to help make this case, including cosmologist Stephen Hawking, former astronaut Mae Jemison, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb and former head of the NASA Ames Research Center Pete Worden. “Today,” Hawking said, “we commit to the next great leap into the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly.”
