The question of when to launch an interstellar mission has occupied us many times in the past. Specifically, how long do we wait so that travel times are reduced to something like the lifetime of a researcher working on the project? But there is another approach to all this. Someone is going to launch an interstellar mission that will be the first human effort to send a payload to another star. It’s all about intentionality and the choice of targets.

A symbolic act? Sure, but don’t write the idea off. We can learn a lot from symbolic acts, and if we only have, at our current level of technology, the ability to reach Voyager-like speeds, we can still work on issues like equipment lifetimes, self-healing technologies, navigational issues and more. We can also work to refine existing AI tools to achieve the most efficient design.

If we give ourselves 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, we have to contend with the fact that the system is constantly moving. On this timeframe, by the time the craft would arrive, Centauri A and B would be a bit over 6 light years from the Sun as opposed to their current 4.365 light years. Trajectory analysis going this far into the future is going to be an interesting challenge.

I mention all this because a call to mount such a mission has now arisen. It bears the name Fermi Explorer, and according to its new website, its intention is to get a spacecraft with a 1 kilogram, 10X10X10 cm payload to the barycenter of the binary Centauri A and B system. In other words, the target is not either star itself but the common center of mass between the two as they orbit.

Some particulars: The mission should launch before the end of 2029 if the effort succeeds, and is intended to cost less than $15 million to design, build, launch and operate. Mission co-founder Philip Johnston is going to have his hands full.

As to departure, Fermi Explorer would take a year and a half moving out of Earth orbit. Then, using a series of Oberth maneuvers taking it to within 0.42 AU of the Sun, the craft would rely upon what the site calls a ‘perihelion pump,’, which involves multiple close solar flybys over 12 years to build the energy to achieve an escape trajectory that, after climbing out of the Sun’s gravity well, attains 23.64 km/sec. That’s a bit higher than Voyager 1’s 17 km/sec. Final Solar System departure would be, after a 2029 launch, around the year 2043. Ahead for the spacecraft would be an unpowered cruise of over 70,000 years.

What the craft will carry is not yet determined, although I notice the plan to put a copy of the Voyager Golden Record and similar materials onboard (I’m assuming this is to be done digitally). Ahead is a three-month period for solicitations for other items of cultural value. Likewise, scientific instruments will undergo their own period of solicitation. The emphasis is on flight-proven hardware with little research and development necessary. To quote from the website:

We will soon put the mission out for open tender to all the major satellite manufacturers, and we aim to open-source as much of the design as we can. The four primary objectives are considered non-negotiable. Everything else is negotiable. For example, the manufacturers can determine the power system, antenna strength, propulsion, mission profile, and whether to include gravity assists, etc. We anticipate that we can do the mission with around a 100-200 kg small solar-powered satellite with just electric propulsion, doing what we call a perihelion pump maneuver… We expect the mission will not have a large antenna for communication, and so we expect we will lose connectivity relatively quickly, and so much of the mission will be autonomous. It will be too small to track and will lose power once it leaves the solar system.

Can crowdfunding build an interstellar craft? The hope is clearly that enough people will become interested to help, with the site offering engraved names and physical objects in the payload itself, so the scientific payload, already tightly squeezed, will have a mass budget with even tighter constraints.

And with all the attention AI is getting in the press, note its use here. The website points to a key technical report called “Interstellar Precursor Mission to Alpha Centauri: Technical Feasibility Assessment,” dated July of 2026. Specifically, the report is said to be: “Prepared with PSI’s Autonomous Physics-Research Platform,” under which is stated “Physical Superintelligence’s agentic research system produced the analyses, simulations, and proof-grade verification in this report end-to-end under staged independent audit.” And again: “This report did not undergo comprehensive human peer review.”

This gets interesting. Writing for MIT Technology Review, Michelle Kim has a fine piece on the use of AI for Fermi Explorer that fills in the background. PSI is a research laboratory called Physical Superintelligence, and its AI system is what came up with the trajectory Fermi Explorer would follow. According to Kim, PSI’s AI went to work on the problem of getting a small spacecraft like this up to speed:

A week later, the AI system turned up a novel trajectory… It combined well-known orbital maneuvers in a way the Fermi team had not considered, according to a paper that has not been peer-reviewed. It suggested that the spacecraft could first slow down so its orbit swings in close to the sun—closer than Mercury. On each close pass, it would fire its engine so that the solar panels get four times the light, and a burst of thrust delivered at high speed would buy more energy than the same burst anywhere else. Because the engine would run only near the sun, the solar panels could stay small and the spacecraft light.

The Fermi Explorer site also links to a separate mission analysis which cross-references the PSI report and seems to agree with its results almost completely. I’m assuming human peer review is going to come into play if momentum for this mission builds. But watching the development of these models for physics and their tweaking along the way is a fascinating exercise.