Scientific and technological ideas can sound outlandish until they suddenly aren’t. Many things people take for granted today were once considered impossible. However, nearly a decade after being revealed, the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot interstellar space project still seems more like a pipe dream than anything else.
Breakthrough Starshot is a research and engineering project led by Breakthrough Initiatives, which was funded by Russian tycoons Yuri and Julia Milner and announced in 2015 by the late renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. The science program aims to search deep space for extraterrestrial life.
The multi-pronged search for alien life relies on multiple Breakthrough projects. One is Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project searching for extraterrestrial audio communications. It is the most extensive search for alien communication data ever.
There is also Breakthrough Message, a program to study the ethics of sending communications out into space; Breakthrough Watch, an astronomical program to search for Earth-like planets in the cosmic vicinity of Earth; and Breakthrough Enceladus, a bio-signature probe mission looking for signs of life on Saturn’s eponymous moon, Enceladus.
Finally, there is Breakthrough Starshot, which is the focus of this article. Breakthrough Starshot is perhaps the most ambitious mission under the Breakthrough umbrella. It is a research and development engineering project to develop a fleet of lightsail interstellar probes.
Dead on arrival.
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