Alpha Centaurus: How to get?

A year after Gagarin’s flight, in 1962, in all Soviet cinemas they showed “nine days of one year”-a film that made nuclear physics with a fashionable specialty, and there theoretical physicists desperately argue in a restaurant with experimental physicists who believe that the galaxy must be conquered immediately. It comes to the calculations on the napkin, how much fuel will be needed by the spacecraft to fly to the stars. "The weight of the ship?" - "One hundred thousand tons." - "Fuel?" - "The most modern." -“You will need 10 in the 22nd degree of tons of the most modern fuel. Help: Our planet weighs slightly less. ”

Rocket fuel, even the most modern, has not become much more effective since then, but after 54 years, scientists seemed to figure out how to be in this situation. On April on April, Astrophysicist Steven Hawking and entrepreneur Yuri Milner arranged a press conference where they announced the Breakthrough Starshot project-an expedition to the nearest (after the Sun) star.

To the alpha centaur 4.3 light year, or about 40 trillion kilometers. In addition to fuel, there is still a problem over time. For ordinary spaceships - like New Horizons, which Pluto first photographed last year - tens of thousands of years on the road. Therefore, space agencies, starting with the American NASA and ending with Japanese JAXA, have still no interstellar travels.

Starchip prototype

Imago / TASS

Breakthrough Starshot aims to get to another star not even in a thousand years and not in a hundred, but in twenty. It seems natural to wait for such statements after the news about some incredible breakthrough in fundamental science-well, for example, if the astronomers really discovered the entrance to the mole-free hole in the nearest surroundings of the Earth with an exit, as in Interstellar, for dozens of light years from here. There are also no less fantastic ideas like a warp-capture that can turn space in front of himself-the theory does not prohibit the existence of more strange things, but so far no one has advanced in this direction.

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