VOYAGE TO NOWHERE

An expensive and ambitious plan for interstellar travel has quietly disappeared

- BY SARAH SCOLES | ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY

IN 2016 BILLIONAIRE YURI MILNER HOSTED a press conference at One World Observatory, the atrium topping the slick skyscraper at the center of the rebuilt World Trade Center complex.

Milner had grown rich investing in tech start-ups, and now he wanted to spend some of that money on sending a spaceship to the stars.

He called the plan Breakthrough Starshot: a project that would eventually take human technology to another solar system. The idea was that high-powered lasers would propel tiny probes to 20 percent of the speed of light, impelling them with enough inertia to launch them toward the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, within 20 years. Milner and his Breakthrough Initiatives, a group of space science research projects related to life in the universe, were pledging $100 million toward a proof of concept. At the event, Milner was joined by, among others, Mae Jemison, a former astronaut and head of 100 Year Starship, an interstellar research program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Pete Worden, former director of NASA's Ames Research Center; and Stephen Hawking, world-famous physicist.

Zachary Manchester, currently an associate professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, signed on for the project's early stages. He remembers it seeming incredible that he, then a wide-eyed 20-something, was at the top of a metropolis, hanging out with people he considered legends—people such as Freeman Dyson, a physicist best known for positing that advanced civilizations could eventually cloak their stars in megastructures that siphoned their power. Dyson was one of several scientific luminaries who were joining the project, including Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter and Martin Rees, then the U.K.'s Astronomer Royal.

In short, the Starshot launch event was flashy. A video preview narrated by actor Seth MacFarlane was also flashy. The text that went along with the announcement? Flashy.