GoKawiilA group of executives and entrepreneurs led by Starcloud co-founders Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden teamed up to develop humanity’s first interstellar spacecraft. If everything goes according to plan, it will launch in 2029, headed for Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our solar system. But it won’t reach its destination for about 80,000 years.
Known as Fermi Explorer, this non-profit mission aims to build a 10cm cube weighing about 1 kilogram (about 2.2 pounds). Once the cube is built, they plan to attach it to a propulsion system, take it to space and launch it toward Alpha Centauri. It’s the technological equivalent of taking a hefty rock into space, throwing it at Alpha Centauri and waiting for it to get there.
“The mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet,” the group said in a post on X. The post is accompanied by a video showing the Fermi Explorer being overtaken by hundreds of faster spacecraft also bound for Alpha Centauri.
The wait for this mission to go interstellar is unreal. The exact wait to mission completion is 79,800 years, according to the Fermi Explorer mission calculator, which means once this thing gets underway, it won’t be the problem of anyone currently living, or anyone else, for a few thousand generations.
Just getting out of the solar system will take longer than any road trip any human has ever taken. The spacecraft is expected to circle the sun for 12 years in an oval orbit. The boosters will fire when the spacecraft gets closer to the sun, a process called the Oberth maneuver, thereby gaining speed through multiple orbits as it approaches escape velocity. Once done, it’ll launch itself and keep going, and going, and going. The Fermi Explorer’s technical feasibility assessment says it should leave the solar system by the early 2040s.
It’s quite a different mission from what Starcloud’s co-founders usually work on: putting data centers in space to power AI. The company plans to launch its first such full commercial data center, called the Starcloud-2, in 2027, but it did send an Nvidia H100 GPU into space via Starcloud-1 in 2025.
More symbolic than scientific
We hope they packed enough snacks, because that’s one long road trip. Fermi Explorer
Interstellar travel takes so long that humanity has focused far more on speeding up the journey than actually making it. One of the big projects addressing this was Breakthrough Starshot, a multi-billion-dollar initiative that would’ve used laser-based propulsion to propel a ship to another star in a matter of decades rather than millennia. That project collapsed in 2025 with no launches.
The only other interstellar missions ever conducted, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, over four decades after their launches.
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