The founders of Starcloud, the startup putting GPUs in orbit, have launched a non-profit called Fermi Explorer to send a one-kilogram spacecraft towards Alpha Centauri.

The payload is 10cm square. The journey takes 80,000 years. The mission is budgeted at about $15-million, roughly R243-million, with a target launch in 2029. It would be the first human-built object explicitly aimed at another star, and the sixth to leave our solar system.

The distances explain the timeline. Voyager launched in 1977 and is about 26 billion kilometres from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 41 trillion kilometres away. The last serious attempt at this was Breakthrough Starshot, founded in 2016 by Yuri Milner and backed by Mark Zuckerberg, which planned to use laser propulsion to make the trip in 20 to 30 years for several billion dollars. It collapsed last year.

Fermi Explorer inverts the approach. It uses existing technology only: a rocket rideshare to get up, then low-power electric propulsion to slingshot through a series of orbits until the vehicle is on course. The spacecraft stays active for about 12 years, then coasts.

Philip Johnston, one of the founders, calls 80,000 years the minimum viable mission, and says other interstellar plans fail because they insist on delivering within a human lifetime, which forces billion-dollar propulsion research. The non-profit is now asking for vendors, funding and payloads.

TechCrunch reported the launch and Johnston's argument that a metal box can survive 50,000 years of radiation if a dinosaur bone can last 200 million years, with the hope that a future civilisation intercepts it. Fermi Explorer is soliciting scientific and artistic payloads, in the manner of the Golden Record carried by Voyager. Scientific American documented the quiet collapse of Breakthrough Starshot, the billion-dollar effort this one is deliberately not copying.

Set aside whether anyone should be doing this. The scoping decision is worth borrowing. Starshot took the hardest constraint, deliver within a human lifetime, and that single requirement forced a propulsion research programme nobody could fund.

Fermi Explorer dropped the constraint everyone assumed was fixed, accepted a timeline no founder will ever see resolved, and got the price down to R243-million using parts that already exist. Johnston's phrase for it is minimum viable mission, which is the same discipline as shipping a product that does one thing badly rather than nothing perfectly.

The obvious catch is that R243-million is not raised; this is a non-profit asking for donations, and nobody will ever know whether it worked.

You might also like our piece on how SpaceX revenue doubled off something other than rockets, the Team ZA space competition win built in a school lab, and the Wits quantum breakthrough in light that survives interference.

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