A newly published scientific paper outlines how a giant laser array could be used to propel a spacecraft to Mars in record time
and was co-founded by Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg. The concept is to send a one gram solar sail with ultra-light cameras to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, to take a picture of an Earth-sized planet in the star’s habitable zone. A multiple kilometers-wide laser array would propel the sail to high speeds, getting it to the more than 4-light-year-away system in just 20 to 30 years.
Duplay found himself drawn to the laser-thermal propulsion to Mars concept for its useful purposes. With the concept outlined in his paper, the laser could send payloads, useful hardware, and astronaut crews around the solar system. “That just felt a little more exciting, a little more interesting to me,” he said.
“Once you’re outside the magnetosphere, you’re getting exposed all the time to cosmic rays,” explained Higgins. “That is a serious concern for astronauts.” Higgins worked with Lubin while on sabbatical at UC Santa Barbara in 2018. Lubin worked on the concept behind the laser arrays that would be necessary to enable Breakthrough Starshot. According to Lubin, the question behind both his own work and Higgins is this: “How do we do better than chemistry to get things faster to places in the solar system?”
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