Stephen Hawking is working on building the fastest spacecraft ever built by man

Space is vast, vaster than anything we’ve ever experienced on the surface of the Earth. It’s so vast, the distances so huge, that even travelling to our nearest planets will take many months. But what of the stars? If the planets are so hard to reach, how long do you think it’ll take to reach our nearest, neighbouring star.

The stars are so far and the speeds we’ve achieved so small that only one of our spacecraft has made it beyond the confines of our solar system. Stephen Hawking might have a solution for that, however. He’s working on a project, dubbed Project Starshot, that aims to build a miniature spacecraft that can go a 1000 times faster than anything we’ve sent before it.

The idea is to build a spacecraft that’s so light that it can be accelerated by the photon energy of Earth-based lasers pushing against its surface. Hawking estimates that they’ll be able to hit speeds in excess of 134 million miles per hour, that’s about a fifth the speed of light, provided the craft is light enough. At these speeds, the craft should be able to reach our nearest star (not the Sun) in less than 20 years.

While it’s easy to build a lightweight spacecraft and a laser system on Earth, the engineering problems are still quite profound. The main problem is that space isn’t empty; it’s flooded with radiation that can prove lethal to a craft as small and light as the one Project Starshot aims to build.

High-energy radiation and fast moving particles can rip an electronic circuit to shreds and the only way to prevent this is by protecting a craft with a radiation shield. To keep the craft light, this is impossible.

Engadget reports that scientists are working on a kind of self-healing circuit to fix combat the issue. They’re working on an experimental “gate-all-around nanowire transistor” which will, hopefully, heal by itself.

The transistors on this chip will feature an extra contact point. The theory is that a current can be passed through the chip to heat it up at certain intervals. The regular heating and cooling is expected to “anneal” the transistors, so to speak, which would, in theory, repair any damage to the circuit.

Nasa is working closely with Stephen Hawking to realise this design and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner is helping with the funding of the project.