Interstellar travel is the latest ambition from the team behind Starcloud, the startup known for its plans to run a fleet of GPUs in orbit. The founders have unveiled a new project: sending a small spacecraft on an 80,000-year voyage toward Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own.
If successful, the craft would become the first human-built object deliberately aimed at another star, and only the sixth to leave the solar system.
What the Fermi Explorer Mission Involves
The initiative, named Fermi Explorer, is run by a newly announced nonprofit now seeking partners, donations, and technical advice. The founding team includes Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, alongside program manager Garret Jameson.
Their plan relies on proven space technologies rather than experimental hardware. The vehicle would carry a payload measuring 10 centimeters square and weighing 1 kilogram. The founders describe the mission as an act of human exploration, an attempt to achieve a historical first, and a way to probe the Fermi paradox, which asks why we have yet to detect other intelligent life in the universe and gives the mission its name.
The project is budgeted at roughly EUR 13 million and targeted for a 2029 launch. The nonprofit is soliciting vendors to build the spacecraft, funding to cover those costs, and scientific and artistic payloads to send along, echoing the sensors and the Golden Record carried aboard NASA’s Voyager, the first human craft to exit the solar system.
The Distance Problem and a Different Strategy
Interstellar exploration typically runs into the enormous distances involved and the relatively slow methods available to cross them. Voyager, launched in 1977, is now about 26 billion kilometers from Earth, while Alpha Centauri sits roughly 41 trillion kilometers away.
The most recent major Silicon Valley attempt at this challenge was Breakthrough Starshot, a nonprofit founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner and backed by Mark Zuckerberg. That effort envisioned a multibillion-dollar program using a laser-based propulsion system to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 to 30 years. It collapsed in 2025.
Fermi Explorer takes the opposite approach, using existing technology rather than pushing the frontier. “I also got excited and then disappointed!” Johnston said of Starshot. “That’s the reason we are doing the mission. We are hell-bent on actually launching something in three years. … the big difference with most other [interstellar] missions and the Fermi Explorer is that the others all try to do it in a human lifetime, which means billion-dollar propulsion R&D programs. We have very deliberately picked 80,000 years as the minimum viable mission.”
How the Spacecraft Would Travel
The plan calls for launching the spacecraft as a rocket rideshare, then using efficient but low-power electric propulsion to slingshot the vehicle through a series of orbits until it is set on course for Alpha Centauri. The craft is designed to stay active for about 12
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Image: techcrunch.com
