Fermi Explorer plans $15M Alpha Centauri probe launch by 2029

The Fermi Explorer Mission plans to launch a spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri by the end of 2029 on a $15 million budget, using a trajectory that an AI research system proposed after the human team had settled on a different flight profile, MIT Technology Review reports.

The system, Get Physics Done, is described in the article as "open-source software that takes a physics research question, breaks it into smaller tasks, and decides which simulations to run." It was built by Physical Superintelligence (PSI), an AI physics research lab, and calls on frontier models including Claude and GPT. Applied to the interstellar problem, it produced a solar-slingshot profile: the craft would swing closer to the sun than Mercury and fire its engines during close passes, when solar panels receive "four times the light," letting a burst of thrust at high speed do work that would otherwise demand larger sails.

Matt Pines, PSI's cofounder and CEO, said the AI came back with "an entirely different mission profile, one that was creative and not one [the Fermi team] had considered," and that this was the more surprising aspect. He conceded a limit on the tooling itself: "I don't think we've yet figured out how these models can internally represent something like that."

Philip Johnston, Fermi Explorer's cofounder and president, framed the point of the mission bluntly. "We didn't want to do another Breakthrough Starshot. We're dead set on something actually launching," he said. The 2016 Breakthrough Starshot initiative pledged $100 million and never launched. The Fermi craft would carry at least a kilogram of payload, including a copy of the Golden Record, and its journey could take up to 80,000 years. Johnston added that the team is "not constraining ourselves to doing it in a human lifetime," and that they are "pretty confident that we will not be the first to arrive."