A couple of weeks ago the world heard about the most seriously funded (and perhaps the most serious) effort yet for starting us on the pathway to interstellar travel.
The Breakthrough Starshot project won't take people to another star, or even take a conventional robotic explorer. Instead the goal is to propel nano-spacecraft, 'Starchips', to the Alpha Centauri system, using the pressure of light on four-meter sails of reflective material. These ultra-lightweight vehicles would end up shooting through that distant system (some 4.3 light years, or 26 trillion miles away) with a velocity of some 20% of the speed of light - a mind-boggling 134 million miles per hour. Such a blistering pace would be achieved in the first couple of minutes of 60,000 g acceleration from a near-Earth starting point.
It is, to say the least, pretty audacious.
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