Stephen Hawking is backing a project to send tiny spacecraft to another star system within a generation

They would travel trillions of miles; far further than any previous craft.

A $100m (£70m) research programme to develop the computer chip-sized “starships” was launched by the billionaire Yuri Milner, supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Interstellar travel has long been a dream for many, but significant technological hurdles remain.

But Prof Hawking told BBC News that fantasy could be realised sooner than we might think.

“If we are to survive as a species we must ultimately spread out to the stars,” he said.

“Astronomers believe that there is a reasonable chance of an Earth-like planet orbiting one of the stars [in] the Alpha Centauri system. But we will know more in the next two decades from ground based and space based telescopes.

“Technological developments in the last two decades and the future make it possible in principle within a generation.”

Prof Hawking is backing a project by Mr Milner’s Breakthrough Foundation, a private organisation funding scientific research initiatives that government funders think to be too ambitious.

Expert group

The organisation has brought together an expert group of scientists to assess whether it might be possible to develop spaceships capable of travelling to another star within a generation and sending information back.

The nearest star system is 40 trillion km (25 trillion miles) away. Using current technology it would take about 30,000 years to get there.

The expert group concluded that with a little more research and development it might be possible to develop spacecraft that could cut that journey time to just 30 years.

“I’d have said that even a few years ago travel to another star at that kind of speed would not be possible,” said Dr Pete Worden, who is leading the project. He is chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and a former director of Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California.

“But the expert group figured out that because of developments in technology there appears to be a concept that appears to work.”

The concept is to reduce the size of the spacecraft to about the size of a chip used in electronic devices. The idea is to launch a thousand of these mini-spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit. Each would have a solar sail.

Learn more: Hawking backs interstellar travel project