Redmond Nonprofit Plans Humanity’s First Journey to Another Star

The Fermi Explorer Mission, a new Redmond-based nonprofit, today unveiled its roadmap to launch humanity’s first spacecraft to another star system by the end of 2029.

Fermi Explorer’s journey toward Alpha Centauri is expected to span roughly 80,000 years, as shown in this concept video.

The spacecraft only needs to be operational for the first 12 years, Philip Johnston, co-founder and president of The Fermi Explorer Mission, said in an interview Monday when asked about the spacecraft’s lifespan. After that, the spacecraft will be far enough away from the sun that it won’t be bombarded by solar flares, for example.

“That’s the first initial phase of the mission where we put ourselves on this trajectory,” he said. “After that, it’s essentially just going to sort of tumble through space. … Once it’s going, it’s just going. It’s like a dinosaur bone, it’s 200 million years it can survive; we’re only asking for 80,000,” he added with a chuckle.

Johnston anticipates future human civilizations, with much more advanced technology, will have already arrived at Alpha Centauri and be able to intercept the spacecraft and see its contents. There will soon be a three-month solicitation period for proposals for scientific and artistic payloads to be added to the mission, which also plans to include a digitized copy of the Golden Record and messages from children around the world for future civilizations. The Golden Record was “a kind of time capsule” on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 missions in 1977, according to the agency’s website.

“We hope to be both the first to leave and the last to arrive at Alpha Centauri,” Johnston said in a news release today announcing the mission. “None of us will be here when this journey ends, and that is the point. It’s about taking the first achievable step and inspiring future generations to keep pushing beyond the limits we inherited.”

Johnston is a familiar name in space circles. He’s co-founder and CEO of Redmond-based Starcloud, which is developing data centers in space. Fermi Explorer is not part of Starcloud, but fellow Starcloud co-founders Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean are co-founders and board members of Fermi Explorer. Separately, Garrett Jameson is Fermi Explorer’s program manager and a former U.S. Air Force officer who was involved in planning and executing multidomain missions, including space operations, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Instead of needing billions of dollars, or propulsion breakthroughs that may take generations to develop, the nonprofit is designing around flight-proven electric propulsion and the constraints of what can be built today, the release said.

“We imposed these constraints that it must launch in the next three years, that it must cost less than $15 million, that it must have a 1 kilogram payload, and that it should get 99% of the way to Alpha Centauri,” Johnston said, adding that Fermi has millions of dollars pledged already and that the mission will definitely happen. Satellite manufacturers will be invited to bid on the mission based on the above parameters.

“Almost all of the Fermi satellite will be propellant, so it’s basically a big Xenon tank strapped to an ion thruster with some solar panels,” Johnston said.

The Fermi Explorer team has designed a feasible mission profile as detailed here, but they’re open to new ideas from the satellite manufacturers, according to the release. The team also worked with a new physical AI lab called PSI, Physical Superintelligence, which conducted a feasibility study and devised the final “perihelion pump” maneuver.

Fermi Explorer plans to open-source its research, analysis, data, and simulation tools so scientists, engineers, educators, students, and curious contributors can test assumptions, improve the mission, and propose useful science for the journey. A child who discovers the project today should be able to learn from it, contribute to it, and watch it launch before graduating from high school, the release added.

Early supporters of the mission include Rob Meyerson, former president of Kent-based Blue Origin, and Alex Wissner-Gross, MIT physicist and investor, the release noted. It added that the nonprofit is inviting people to participate by either donating to the mission and/or contributing research and technical expertise, scientific and artistic proposals.

The Fermi mission is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, after whom the Fermi Paradox is named. The nonprofit’s website FAQs discuss the paradox in detail.

Without getting too complex about the paradox and two of its so-called Great Filters the nonprofit is trying to disprove, Johnston offered another inspiration for the Fermi Explorer: “Inspiring the next generation of potential interstellar travelers.”

He also thinks that any civilization in Alpha Centauri will see the Fermi Explorer coming into the solar system and welcome it.

“I think it’ll be one of the most fascinating artifacts in galactic history — the first spacecraft to leave a star to go to another star,” Johnston said. “Imagine if a few thousand years ago, Cleopatra in Egypt had set a small wooden vessel on a voyage out west and it had been sailing across the seas for the last 3,000 years and it was about to pull into New York Harbor. There would be like a flotilla going out to meet that ship and they would capture it and they would put it in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and it would hopefully stay there for another 10,000 years — and I view it a bit like that. I hope it will be seen as significant in some way.”