Such complete bullcrap. Even if they could accelerate a “wafersat” weighing a few grams to 1/4 the speed of light, what would they get from it when it gets to another star system? The antenna couldn’t be big enough to overcome the path loss. They will never see images from such a craft. It’d be a foolhardy project; spending all that money for something they could never hope to heard from.
The only practical use would be inside the solar system, and only after you constructed a laser system at the destination to slow the thing back down. Of course, then it would not have enough time or distance to reach even a fraction of the maximum speed, but it would probably be faster than other existing technology.
Considering it has been almost 50 years since we first landed on the moon and we still haven’t built any moon bases yet, I expect that we could see the thing up and running in about 1,500 years.
Why not use the money from the GIS agency for something that might have a useful purpose,
They could launch a string of them in a wireless sensor network, and send information back to earth in a sequential manner through the linear network.
... just a thought.