Lakbima News, Colombo — The founders of Starcloud, a startup that plans to run GPUs in orbit, are now promoting a different project: a small spacecraft they say is intended to travel to Alpha Centauri on an 80,000-year trajectory.
If launched as described, the team says the craft would be the first human-built object explicitly aimed at another star and only the sixth human spacecraft to leave the solar system. Those claims appear in a statement released by the group that identified the project as Fermi Explorer and named Starcloud founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden, along with program manager Garret Jameson, as the initial team.
Fermi Explorer’s announcement gives technical and financial targets: a 10 cm square payload weighing about 1 kilogram, a projected cost near $15 million, and a planned launch in 2029. The non-profit is soliciting vendors to build the vehicle, donors to fund the work, and scientific and cultural payloads similar to the sensors and the Voyager Golden Record that NASA sent on Voyager, the first human spacecraft to leave the solar system.
The plan uses established space technology rather than speculative propulsion. According to the team’s materials, the craft would ride to orbit on a commercial rideshare launch, then use low-thrust electric propulsion to change orbits until it escapes the Sun’s gravity and heads toward Alpha Centauri. The designers expect the spacecraft to operate for roughly 12 years before entering a long coast phase toward the target star.
“I also got excited and then disappointed,” Johnston said in the statement referring to Breakthrough Starshot, the 2016 initiative that proposed a laser-driven probe to reach Alpha Centauri in two or three decades. “That’s the reason we are doing the mission. We are determined to actually launch something in three years. The big difference is that most other interstellar missions aim to reach a star in a human lifetime, which requires billion-dollar propulsion research programs. We have deliberately set 80,000 years as the minimum viable mission.”
The announcement addresses the durability question by pointing to geological examples and materials testing. “If a dinosaur bone can last 200 million years then a metal box can easily survive the radiation environment we expect for 50,000 years,” Johnston said. The team says it does not plan to power the spacecraft at the end of the 80,000 years; instead it hopes a future civilization will intercept it.
Distances underscore the project’s scale. Voyager, launched in 1977, is now about 26 billion kilometres from Earth. Alpha Centauri is roughly 4.37 light years away, about 41 trillion kilometres. Most interstellar proposals falter at the gap between current propulsion methods and the distances involved; Breakthrough Starshot, backed publicly by Yuri Milner and others, proposed a multibillion-dollar laser array but wound down major efforts in 2025, according to public statements from its backers.
Lakbima News asked Fermi Explorer for supporting documents on propulsion testing, radiation hardening and launch agreements. The group provided the initial announcement and a summary of planned suppliers but did not supply independent test data or signed launch contracts at the time of publication. The non-profit has listed contact details for vendors and a fundraising page, and it invited scientific teams to submit proposed payloads.
The proposal raises immediate questions for engineers and mission planners: how the electric propulsion profile would achieve solar escape velocity, what materials and shielding will be used for multidecade exposure to the solar and interstellar environment, and how the project will secure a launch slot and insurance for such an unconventional mission. The team’s public materials outline an approach but stop short of detailed, peer-reviewed engineering studies.
Fermi Explorer’s timeline and cost target are ambitious compared with current small-satellite practice. The group’s next steps, as described in its announcement, are to select vendors, raise the stated funding, and finalize a launch agreement. Lakbima News will continue to follow filings and technical updates and will report any contracts, test results or regulatory approvals as they become available.
