There's a star nearly 5 light-years from Earth. Stephen Hawking is sending a spacecra

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There's a star nearly 5 light-years from Earth. Stephen Hawking is sending a spacecraft to it
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Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg and a group of tech and science giants want to send a tiny probe ** bigger than an iPhone traveling at 100 million miles per hour to the nearest star.

This $100 million "Breakthrough Starshot" project is a "proof of concept" program designed to assess the feasibility of sending a tiny spacecraft out to Alpha Centauri by surfing on light beams.

SEE ALSO: Stephen Hawking gets a million followers within 6 hours on his new Weibo account (http://mashable.com/2016/04/12/stephen-hawking-weibo/)


Sails would be attached to the na**craft that would catch the light from a ground-based light beam, thereby propelling it through the solar system and beyond. Read more... (http://mashable.com/2016/04/12/hawking-starshot-interstellar/)


More about Mark Zuckerberg (http://mashable.com/category/mark-zuckerberg/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial), Stephen Hawking (http://mashable.com/category/stephen-hawking/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial), Alpha Centauri (http://mashable.com/category/alpha-centauri/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial), Interstellar (http://mashable.com/category/interstellar/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial), and Tech (http://mashable.com/tech/?utm_campaign=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial)http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Mashable/~4/deM8bGtwe**