[UCANSEE2]

[Governor Dinwiddie]

How 'bout just flushing the money down the toilet instead?
 

[Puppage]

That’s where Will Robinson was heading to.

[plain talk]

Breakthrough Starshot is hoping to launch a small probe that would both depart much sooner and travel much faster, arriving as quickly as 20 years.

Breakthrough Starshot relies on a huge investment in ground based lasers. I do like the idea of extremely small robotic probes. However I am skeptical of their means of propulsion. By the time they could build something like this scientists would have come up with a better solution.

[Eddie01]

Total Suck.

I’ll be dead.

[ransomnote]

NASA lies to the public for a living so I wonder what they really want to do with their time and money?

[MNDude]

I’ll be dead by then. For sure I’ll be dead by the time the probe arrives!

[Political Junkie Too]

With what engineers? Ours?

Unless Alpha Centauri is suffering from global warming as a result of light-skinned multi-ped worshippers of a universal creator who is ignoring their destruction of the Centauri climate that harms the child-bearing, youth, and life-giving fauna, who will teach our future engineers to be qualified to get there?

-PJ

[antidemoncrat]

Rocket speed is 590000000000 mph? Needs high test gas?

[JPG]

I remember a radio show where the crew finally arrive at a planet around another star, looking for life.

They find life....but it was another crew from earth who left years later but arrived years sooner due to improved technology.

[Redcitizen]

I thought we had some ion drives that we can use now to at least get something moving towards alpha centauri.

[wardamneagle]

DANGER !!! DANGER !!!!l

[PIF]

NASA going to Alpha Centauri in 2069; Liu Cixin writes “The Three Body Problem” about the inhabitants and the horrible conditions generated by living on a planet caught by three stars forcing them to come here. Coincidence? I think not.

[onedoug]

Highlighting just a few of the problems with all this alien UFO nonsense.

And that's just our closest stellar system neighbor.

[ml/nj]

Let's p*ss away some more money. When it's halfway there it would take two years for it to receive a mid-course correction and two more years to receive an acknowledgement. When it gets there, if it ever does, aiming its camera will take eight years.

ML/NJ

[tumblindice]

`Tomorrow is Yesterday’: just have a space shuttle `slingshot’ around the Sun. Using that tremendous gravity assist, then go forward in time and discover the technology.
OK do I win anything, like Science Dumbass of the Waning Year? I would like to accept the medal from Abraham Lincoln on Alpha Centauri.

[Crucial]

For simplicity’s sake and due to the ever increasing rate of technological advances, NASA should probably limit its missions to ten year increments and wait until the technology can make that a reality.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

If you thought NASA was playing the long game with its plan to put people on Mars in the 2030s, you haven't seen anything yet. New Scientist has learned that a team at the administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has started planning a mission that would send a spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri system in... 2069.

They might launch it in 2069, but it won't get there for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Proxima Centauri is 4 light-years away. It's nice to think that there might be some breakthrough in the intervening centuries worthy of Star Trek that will allow some Earth ship capable of faster-than-light travel to someday find this probe ambling along toward Alpha Centauri.

[ridesthemiles]

Quick- Call in Sheldon Cooper.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

So why the long wait? Simple: the technology to make this trip realistic doesn't exist yet.