The main idea behind the Breakthrough Initiatives Starshot is to launch tiny spacecraft (nanocraft) that can reach super fast speeds in order to get to the nearest star (other than the Sun) in 20 years. Here are important details that I know (some of these might just be speculation).
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The nanocraft will be small with a mass of “several grams.” Size does matter—I’ll tell you why.
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The primary propulsion will come from a ground-based 100 GigaWatt laser and a 1-square-meter solar sail (I am going to talk about how this works).
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The nanocraft will be able to communicate back to Earth with its own laser (but not 100 GigaWatt).
That’s enough information to look at a couple of physics ideas related to the Starshot project.
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