Fermi Explorer Mission to launch Alpha Centauri spacecraft by end of 2029

September 2, 2026 at 12:10 AM2 min

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The Fermi Explorer Mission announced plans to launch a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by the end of 2029. The spacecraft will follow a trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), which launched today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy. The mission is expected to cost $15 million and will carry at least one kilogram of cargo, including a copy of the Golden Record.

Key Facts

The Fermi Explorer Mission plans to launch a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri by the end of 2029.
The spacecraft will follow a trajectory discovered by an AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI).
PSI launched today with $58 million in funding led by Breakthrough Energy, founded by Bill Gates.
The mission is expected to cost $15 million and will carry at least one kilogram of cargo.
The spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away.

Mission Details

The Fermi Explorer Mission, a nonprofit organization, announced the launch plan today. The spacecraft will carry artistic and scientific payloads, messages, and a copy of the Golden Record. The Golden Record is a gold-plated disc of Earth's sounds and images that NASA attached to its two Voyager probes in 1977. The mission is currently funded by individual private donors.

AI Trajectory Discovery

The Fermi team struggled for a year to find a workable route for a small, solar-powered spacecraft costing only $15 million. Johnston mentioned the problem on a podcast hosted by Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who cofounded PSI. Wissner-Gross offered to run it through an AI system called Get Physics Done. Get Physics Done is open-source software that breaks physics research questions into smaller tasks and decides which simulations to run.

Interstellar Challenges

Alpha Centauri is about 25 trillion miles away from Earth. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has covered less than 1% of that distance. At Voyager 1's speed, the trip would take more than 70,000 years. In 2016, Yuri Milner announced Breakthrough Starshot, a plan to use lasers to propel probes to Alpha Centauri within 20 years. A decade later, nothing from Breakthrough Starshot has launched.