As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology)
Jesus, at 4.25 light-years.
Acceleration is a bitch. A manned flight would take longer as it would have to cap it’s thrust to 1-1.5G or risk long term effects. Not to mention having to cancel ALLL of that thrust starting at the halfway point.
A very cool idea, however the headline is misleading - NASA has not even remotely committed to running this mission. They’ve selected the swarm project as one of 13 projects in their innovation program and given it up to $175k to study feasibility. That’s roughly a postdoc for two years. This is far, far from committing the hundreds of millions or billions needed for the execution of this mission.
