Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft.
Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.
This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don’t yet exist. However, hypothetical projects like this one can still add to our existing knowledge base and help engineers improve upcoming designs.
Their presentation on Canva
I feel like we might want to double check this before launching the Chrysalis. Cool concept, though.
We haven’t sent even a probe. No wait, sending a probe is not even on our current plans.
The people are the probe
Well, that’s a way too expensive probe then.
I believe i read somewhere that a light probe, accelerated by a laser beam, could make a flyby there as close as 27 years from launch.
Oh, neat, well it was too early in the morning, but true, you can make things faster if you don’t care about the survival of prganic matter.
There is the Starshot Breakthrough project that study the feasibility of sending probes to our closest stars.