It needs a relatively small amount of funding. Essentially a 100 gigawatt powerplant, strapped to a 1kmx1km array of lasers. Very lightweight probes (that could potentially be mass manufactured) propelled by these lasers.
If it comes to fruition, we could have probes that we can send to nearly our entire stellar neighborhood at significant fractions of the speed of light.
We could:
Get a constant stream of pictures and data of exoplanets within our stellar neighborhood.
Send these lightweight probes WITHIN HOURS/DAYS inside our solar system.
Very rapidly send exploratory probes to any given object. Another Omuamua comes in? Yep, we’re getting to it in hours baybee.
Literally SciFi stuff that we can achieve with little bit of development in material science. Again, the bottleneck is FUNDING, not technological. But come on, it’s so worth it!
Breakthrough starshot.
It needs a relatively small amount of funding. Essentially a 100 gigawatt powerplant, strapped to a 1kmx1km array of lasers. Very lightweight probes (that could potentially be mass manufactured) propelled by these lasers.
If it comes to fruition, we could have probes that we can send to nearly our entire stellar neighborhood at significant fractions of the speed of light.
We could:
Literally SciFi stuff that we can achieve with little bit of development in material science. Again, the bottleneck is FUNDING, not technological. But come on, it’s so worth it!