Starcloud founders unveil plan for 80,000-year journey to Alpha Centauri
The founders behind orbital-GPU startup Starcloud have launched a non-profit called Fermi Explorer, aiming to send a tiny probe on an 80,000-year trip to Alpha Centauri starting in 2029. It would be the first human-built object explicitly aimed at another star.
The team behind Starcloud, a startup planning to operate GPU servers in orbit, has introduced a new venture aimed at investors, partners and donors: a non-profit mission called Fermi Explorer, designed to send a small spacecraft toward the Alpha Centauri star system.
The initiative comes from Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden, together with program manager Garret Jameson. They are now seeking vendors, funding and payload contributions to build and launch a vehicle carrying a 10-centimeter-square, 1-kilogram payload into interstellar space.
If successful, the probe would become only the sixth human-made object to leave the solar system, and the first ever deliberately aimed at another star. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, lies roughly 41 trillion kilometers away — a distance the mission expects to cover in about 80,000 years.
Using proven technology instead of new breakthroughs
The mission is budgeted at around $15 million, with a targeted launch in 2029. The non-profit is looking for companies to build the spacecraft, funding to support the effort, and scientific or artistic payloads to include, similar to the sensors and Golden Record carried aboard NASA's Voyager probe.
This approach contrasts with Breakthrough Starshot, a 2016 initiative backed by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg that aimed to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 to 30 years using an unproven laser-propulsion system, before shutting down in 2025. Fermi Explorer instead relies entirely on existing, proven space technology rather than pursuing new propulsion research.
The plan involves launching the craft as a rideshare payload, then using low-power electric propulsion to build up a series of orbits that eventually send it on a trajectory out of the solar system toward Alpha Centauri. The spacecraft would remain operational for about 12 years before entering a long coasting phase for the rest of the journey.
Johnston compared the spacecraft's expected durability to that of a dinosaur bone, expressing confidence it could withstand tens of thousands of years of radiation exposure, and said the team hopes a future human civilization might eventually intercept it.
