It seems space travel makes for strange bedfellows. In this case, Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner and John Culberson, a space geek and a Republican congressman from Texas, are both badgering NASA to build a spacecraft capable reaching Alpha Centauri, the nearest galaxy to ours that's 40 trillion years away.

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Culberson wants NASA to achieve this feat by 2069, the centenary of humankind's first landing on the Moon on July 21, 1969 by Apollo 11.

The catch is the spacecraft they need to do this exist only in science fiction. Culberson, however, made a series of recommendations on how NASA might do this in a bill from the House appropriations panel about NASA's budget for fiscal year 2017.

Culberson's panel "encourages NASA to study and develop propulsion concepts that could enable an interstellar scientific probe with the capability of achieving a cruise velocity of 0.1c (10% of the speed of light)."

Culberson also wants NASA to look into the "Bussard ramjet" that uses electromagnetic fields to capture hydrogen (the most plentiful element in the universe) from space. This ramjet compresses the hydrogen until nuclear fusion occurs. Theoretically, this engine won't ever run out of "gas," in this case, hydrogen.

Another incredible technology Culberson wants explored is "antimatter-catalyzed fusion" that powers a spacecraft with a string of thermonuclear explosions. The survival of the crew and the spacecraft in the face of successive massive nuclear explosions is iffy at best.

The fastest current propulsion technology now available will allow a spacecraft to reach Alpha Centauri in 18,000 years. A spacecraft with a propulsion system envisaged by Culberson might make the same trip in only 44 years.

The "if" is the immense amount of energy required for such a fantastically long voyage in almost impossible to produce on a spacecraft. This is where Milner comes in. The Russian billionaire has launched the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot project that proposes sending a "spacecraft-on-a-chip" called a "Starchip" weighing less than one gram to a star.

Despite its puny size, Starchip will have cameras, photon thrusters, a power supply, navigation and communication equipment.

This minuscule starship will be equipped with large but very light solar light-sails capable of propelling this midget to 20% of light-speed using the energy delivered by a vast array of high-powered lasers firing at the sails from the Earth.

Technology of this kind is what NASA is already funding under its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. NIAC is studying "directed energy propulsion for wafer-sized spacecraft that in principle could achieve velocities exceeding 0.1c."

The study, Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration (DEEP IN), was inspired by Breakthrough Starshot.

In Milner's concept, Earth-based lasers would propel the nanocraft in Earth orbit to 60,000 g for a few minutes to reach 20% of the speed of light. That's fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri in just 20 years.

"It's the first time in human history that we can do more than just stare at the stars," Milner said.

TagsNASA, Alpha Centauri, Yuri Milner, John Culberson, "Bussard ramjet