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The wild "Starshot" project was conceived to design a probe that could reach Proxima Centauri in about 20 years.
Although project has gone dormant, it has yielded a lot of new ideas (many not widely shared, alas) about how to build a viable interstellar probe.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2026/03/10/starshot-is-a-success-part-ii/ #space #science #technology
@coreyspowell Wouldn't it make more sense to try for a proof-of-concept mission to, say, Pluto, that could get results in single-digit years or even faster? (Might even do some useful science when it gets there, for example by giving us a laser spectrophotometry reflector target occulted by Pluto's atmosphere as it heads towards Aphelion.)
@cstross @coreyspowell There are numerous ideas for mission concepts using laser sails or high performance solar sails.
One problem is that laser sail propulsion is particularly inefficient at "low" speeds. And by "low", I mean under 30,000km/s. (Several orders of magnitude faster than anything we've launched so far.)
Another big problem is that the laser itself is a humongous expense, so it's good to have alternative uses for it.
@isaackuo
@cstross @coreyspowell
Alternate Use Cases being .. "military"?
Where would they even put the laser? A high plateau? Is there a laser frequency mininmally affected by our atmosphere? Or in Orbit?
@xro @cstross @coreyspowell Probably not military, but it could be useful for de-orbiting bits of space debris, or providing temporary solar power and/or heating to satellites in high orbits.
For some of these applications, it's okay to be blocked by cloud cover some of the time. For others, it could be worth siting on a mountain above most cloud cover.
One could send a larger lightsail spacecraft 600 au or so in the opposite direction to Proxima Centauri without assuming things like "a laser array that could set the atmosphere on fire".
And it would provide better images of Proxima b than the Starshots would have.
(Because of the Sun acting as a gravitational lens and because even if they were possible, the Starshots would not have been able to get more than one low-resolution image each as they flew through.)
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