This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature space probes attached to lightsails – to speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour. In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed. The stars, it seems, have set strict bounds on human destiny. Since Apollo 11’s ‘moonshot’, we have been sending our machines ahead of us – to planets, comets, even interstellar space.īut with current rocket propulsion technology, it would take tens or hundreds of millennia to reach our neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri. The story of humanity is a story of great leaps – out of Africa, across oceans, to the skies and into space.
