Breakthrough Starshot
Breakthrough Starshot is a plan to fly gram-sized probes to Alpha Centauri on sails pushed by lasers from Earth. It has since been put on hold, with about $4.5 million of $100 million spent.
Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, is 4.37 light years away, and the fastest spacecraft of 2016 would have needed about 30,000 years to reach it. That year Breakthrough Starshot proposed skipping the rocket: a chip of about a gram on a sail a few hundred atoms thick, pushed by a 100-gigawatt laser array to a fifth of light speed. The trip would take about 20 years. The program has since been put on hold, having spent roughly $4.5 million of a $100 million pledge.
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