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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Breakthrough Starshot is a scam and I can't believe that NASA is falling for it.

I know some of the folks involved and they are working on 50 years to launch. It's a long term (multiprong) research project.

I wouldn't call it a scam, I would call it "blue sky" (if it weren't a space project!)

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> I wouldn't call it a scam, I would call it "blue sky" (if it weren't a space project!)

Uh, don't we already have "moonshot" for this kind of endeavor, which the name "starshot" already plays on / speaks to?

Seems likely some of the tiny probes will end up in the star so I suppose the name would be appropriate :-)

>I know some of the folks involved and they are working on 50 years to launch.

I.e. far enough in the future to safely assume all current employees will happily retire. Isn't that brilliant?

Is it any different from building a cathedral?

50 years to launch is a scam. I literally calculated rough trajectories using basic software (NASA EMTG) on how to get a probe out in the rough direction of proxima centuri now. A 50 year timeline on relatively simple things like this should be laughed out of the room. Even though Elon Musk is morally reprehensible now, his “unrealistic” schedules of 2 years may go over for moonshots but even twice the amount of time means the project is done in 4-5 years. Not some ridiculous 2 generation long schedule.

If it takes 2-4% of the world's current electricity production to propel the things alone, we're maybe not ready to do it quite yet.

But we're ready to start thinking about it. Just like we dreamt about rockets going to the moon decades before we attempted going to the moon.

let me understand: you played with a software vaguely related to the topic for 5 mn and it was enough to decide that 50 years to make happen a mission that was never done before is a scam ?

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