Scientists Have a Radical Plan to Travel to the Nearest Star System Within

Traveling from one star to another is currently impossible to achieve within a human lifetime. But some projects are designing ways to propel payloads to the nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) using beams of electrons.
A new proposal uses an electron beam fired from a stable platform near the Sun, which could push a 1,000 kg spacecraft for up to 100 AU (100 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth).
Although filled with yet-to-be-discovered materials and concepts, this idea could theoretically propel a probe to Alpha Centauri in just 40 years.

Sci-fi shows like Star Trek are often a laundry list of technological dreams. Food replicators, holodecks, and transporters? Yes to all of the above, please. But the item far and away at the top of that wishlist is an engine capable of cutting down travel times between stars from millions of years to mere minutes. For the USS Enterprise, that means a warp engine, but scientists back on 21^st century Earth are working out ways to travel to the nearest star system—Alpha Centauri—with technology that’s a bit more within our grasp.

The most prominent of these enterprises (pun intended), is a project known as Breakthrough Starshot, which aims to use lasers to propel a solar sail carrying an ultralight payload (around a few grams) for 0.1 astronomical units (AU) of its 277,000 AU journey. The hope is to reach speeds of 100 million miles per hour—roughly 20 percent the speed of light. That means the miniature probe could reach Earth’s nearest star, located some 4.25 light-years away, in just 20 years.

However, a new paper—co-written by the chairmen of the company Tau Zero Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to advancing interstellar flight—details a second strategy that comes with one big advantage over its pint-sized alternative: it can carry a payload up to 1,000 kilograms. That’s even more than NASA’s Voyager probes, which remain the only two satellites that have ever successfully left the Solar System. Highlighted in a new paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica, this spacecraft relies on a relativistic electron beam fired from a solar statite (static satellite) devilishly close to the Sun’s surface.

The authors argue that this electron beam—which (using a concept known as relativistic pinch) boasts relativistic speeds that keep the negatively-charged electrons from repelling each other—could push the spacecraft far beyond Starshot’s 0.1 AU threshold. At 19 gigaelectron volts, the lightsail could be pushed for 100 AU, which is nearly the edge of the Solar System. It’s possible that the craft could even be pushed up to an incredible 1,000 AU, according to the authors.

This, of course, has obvious advantages. Because Breakthrough Starshot’s payload is so small, reaching Proxima Centauri—the nearest star to us in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system—would be little more than an engineering accomplishment. But with a 1,000 kg satellite, NASA (or whatever space agency is behind this bold endeavor) could actually do some incredible science (though it would still take over four years to even get data back to Earth).

So…what’s the catch? Glad you asked. For one, a solar-based statite is hypothetical at best. According to Universe Today, it’d also need to be as close to the Sun as the closest approach made by the Parker Solar Probe this past December—around 3.8 million miles from the solar surface. Because the probe was traveling at 430,000 miles per hour, it didn’t stay around long enough to feel the Sun’s full, metal-melting wrath. A future solar statite would need to be made with some pretty stern stuff to survive just sitting in that blazing heat.

But if aerospace engineers can overcome these limitations, humanity could be sending probes toward the nearest star system with a flight time of just 40 years—seven years shorter than Voyager’s mission today. It’s not exactly the 37-hour trip that the USS Enterprise can pull off at warp eight, but it’s a start.

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