World-renowned
British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday teamed up with
Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
in a 100-million-U.S.-dollar effort to make tiny spaceships capable
of interstellar space travel.
Hawking and
Milner made the joint announcement at a press conference held at One
World Observatory in New York City Tuesday. The project, dubbed
"Breakthrough Starshot," is a research and engineering
program that aims to build laser beam propelled "nanocrafts"
that can travel at 20 percent of lightspeed -- more than 1000 times
faster than current fastest spacecraft.
According to
Milner, once the "nanocrafts" are built, they could reach
Alpha Centauri, a star 4.37 light-years away, approximately 20 years
in a fly-by mission. Alpha Centauri is one of the closest star
systems to the solar system and the current fastest spacecraft would
have to spend 30,000 years to get there.
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