Apr 13, 2016 3 min read

It’s called a “starchip,” and that’s not a typo.

Physicist Stephen Hawking and entrepreneur Yuri Milner earlier this week announced a project to send tiny spacecraft – not much larger than postage stamps and weighing less than an ounce – toward stars trillions of miles away.

Propelled by energy from a powerful array of Earth-based lasers, the spacecraft – perhaps hundreds or thousands of them – would fly at about a fifth the velocity of light. At that speed, they could reach the closest stars to our sun, the binary Alpha Centauri system, in about 20 years.

There are some hurdles the Starshot project must clear, however.

First, neither the spacecraft nor the lasers to propel them have been invented yet; and second, how could such tiny spaceships get the power to send back observations, which would take 4.3 years to receive?

Hawking believes these technical obstacles could be overcome and the starchips could be launched “within a generation.”

Milner said the spacecraft might discover planets.

But planets orbiting stars even farther away are being discovered nearly every day, and astronomers are doing that the old-fashioned way – with telescopes and mathematics.

The Starshot project has grabbed the spotlight, but there are other worthy scientific efforts going on that will yield new discoveries, and do so much faster.

NASA’s Solar Probe Plus, scheduled for launch in 2018, will explore the closest star to Earth: our own Sun, which it will orbit above at 3.7 million miles. Solar Probe is expected to reach an orbit speed of 450,000 miles per hour, faster than any spacecraft has ever traveled. But even if that craft were to head off to Alpha Centauri at that pace – .067 the speed of light – it would take 6,417 years to reach its destination.

Astronomers detected one, and possibly two, Earth-sized planets orbiting one of the Alpha Centauri stars, although the findings have been disputed. To verify the existence of this planet would require too many hours of dedicated observation by the Hubble telescope. According to the website New Scientist, upcoming instruments like the European Extremely Large Telescope or the Cheops space telescope might be able to see the new planet, but the best option could be a small satellite dedicated to staring at Alpha Centauri. Such a mission would cost only around $2 million.

The Starshot micro fleet is a fascinating idea, but a low-budget alternative has a big advantage: we wouldn’t have to wait 25 years to learn about what it found.