[space] Nonprofit plans an $15 million mission to Alpha Centauri, AI helped design it

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A newly announced nonprofit called the Fermi Explorer Mission wants to launch a shoebox sized spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri, 4.4 light years away, for under 15 million dollars, aiming for launch before the end of 2029. The probe would carry at least 1 kilogram of payload and reach the system in roughly 77,000 to 80,000 years, using solar electric propulsion and repeated close solar flybys called perihelion pump maneuvers to build up speed before achieving an escape trajectory after about 12 years, ultimately traveling around 25 kilometers per second

Co-founder Philip Johnston, also known for the Starcloud space data center startup, said the team spent a year failing to find a workable design before linking up with physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, founder of an AI company called Physical Superintelligence. According to MIT Technology Review, that AI system conducted the core research mostly on its own over three days, running roughly a billion tokens, with an astrophysicist on staff steering it toward the mission's actual requirements, requesting cost analysis and clearer charts, and checking the output for errors before the team settled on the final approach

Unlike Breakthrough Starshot, the billionaire funded 2016 interstellar project that pledged 100 million dollars toward laser propelled probes and has yet to launch anything, the Fermi Explorer team deliberately chose to use existing technology rather than developing anything new, aiming for a bare minimum viable mission instead. Public donors can get their name engraved on the spacecraft for 100 dollars or listed on the mission website for 10 dollars. Curious what people think about using AI specifically to solve a genuinely novel engineering problem like this, does that change how much confidence you'd place in the resulting mission design

How AI plotted an interstellar journey to Alpha Centauriwww.technologyreview.com