What's the weather like at Alpha Centauri? A new $100 million research program called Breakthrough Starshot might just help us find out. In his April 12 announcement, Russian Yuri Milner (read about his Breakthrough Listen program to find alien signals on p. 36) called it "the Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight." By harnessing technological advances from products like cellphones, he plans to build a ship weighing a few grams, attach it to a lightsail, and push it to near-light speed by laser beams shot from the ground. It could reach the nearest star system in just 20 years. "As with any moonshot, there are major engineering challenges to solve," says Milner, who expects the ultimate mission cost to be on par with the biggest international science projects.
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