Project Dragonfly. A Laser-Powered Probe to Alpha Centauri

For a while for sure. Time too long, cost too high - ain't gonna happen in our lifetimes IMO (barring extraordinary new physics which is equally unlikely). Funds much better spent on our solar system...

Manufacturing a 100 GW pulse laser is not a big issue - manufacturing a 100 GW laser that will fire continuously is quite another matter and, AFAIK, way beyond the capability of "near technology", let alone running it continuously in outer space for almost four years.

Another excellent video. Unfortunately by the time we receive data from Alpha, the few of us that remain will be living in caves.

A very interesting project, well explained as always! Thanks Fraser!

A very nice video!! But I have to think that you are all of you quite INSANE to believe that you could send a 2,700 kg. spacecraft to Alpha Centauri!! Are you planning on using an old vacuum tube based ENIAC style computer onboard the thing?? We are now in the age of something called NANOtechnology. Have you ever heard of it?? The key idea behind it is to build machines that are fully operational but as small as one can possibly make them. In the case of a space probe to Alpha Cent. this would mean that the whole probe with its laser sail should be kept under even a SINGLE kilogram if at all possible, so that the enormous energy imparted by the Earth-bound laser could accelerate the probe to a velocity vastly greater than 5% of c, indeed to a significant percentage of c itself. [I haven't actually run the numbers on this, but obviously the lighter the spacecraft the quicker the acceleration and ultimate velocity would be.] In fact, it seems to me, -- and I have thought about this mater quite a bit in the past -- that it is precisely the advent of nanotechnology, not say the vast improvements in laser technology, nor the invention of super-strong graphene structures off which to bounce the laser beam for propulsion, that MIGHT actually make such a space probe work. .... The biggest, and really ONLY remaining problem would be, of course, how to put all of the insturmentation desired into a probe that is so small and light. Well, have you ever used a smartphone perhaps? The instrumentation in one of those is already incredibly tiny compared to anything that was available even just ten, not to mention 20 years ago! There is no reason to believe that a concerted effort to minaturize and integrate all of the insturments and electronics needed for a probe that could relay back the vast majority of what scientists want to know about this nearby star system could not, with some clever design and integration of the circuitry, also be miniturized to the point where the whole probe could be kept very small and light, as I said, preferably under or around one or at most a few kilograms in total!! This is the road you folks need to be travelling in my opinion!! Instead you seem to be designing a probe for the 21st Century that is planning to use technology, and worse still, IDEAS, from the 1970s!! Get with it Dudes and Dudettes!!