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LiveScience
LiveScience
Elise Poore

Would you board a spacecraft that takes 400 years to reach Alpha Centauri?

Alpha Centauri
An artist's rendition of the spacecraft Chrysalis.

Imagine leaving Earth forever and boarding a spaceship designed to carry you and thousands of others on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri — a journey that could take 400 years.

This is the bold vision behind Chrysalis, a hypothetical spacecraft that could transport 2,400 people over 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers) to the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition on July 23, a contest among engineers to design a hypothetical multigenerational spacecraft built for long-duration interstellar travel and capable of sustaining a closed society over centuries.

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