A Nonprofit Says AI Planned an Interstellar Mission It Intends to Launch by 2029

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The Fermi Explorer Mission announced on September 1 that it intends to launch a spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri by the end of 2029, with AI used to plot the trajectory and mission design. MIT Technology Review's own framing calls the timeline hugely ambitious, which is the appropriate amount of skepticism for a nonprofit announcing a 2029 interstellar launch. The interesting claim is narrower than the headline: AI-driven search over a trajectory design space that human mission planners had bounded differently.