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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
 Fermi Explorer logo, 2026 | |
| Founded | September 2026 in Redmond, Washington, US |
|---|---|
| Founders | Philip Johnston (CEO) Kam Ghaffarian Ezra Feilden Adi Oltean Garrett Jameson |
| Type | 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation |
| Headquarters | US |
CEO | Philip Johnston |
| Website | www |
The Fermi Explorer Mission a US non-profit organization that plans to launch the first spacecraft to another star.[1][2][3] The project aims to launch a spacecraft, called Fermi Explorer, before the end of 2029 and to send the spacecraft at least 99% of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun.[4][3][5] The proposed journey will take approximately 77,000 years, which is the optimum arrival time for least fuel and cost.[4][6]
The mission is designed as a low-cost interstellar spacecraft, with a target budget of less than US$15 million for its design, construction, launch and operation.[1][2][7][4]
The Fermi Explorer Mission is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit initiative establish by Philip Johnston (Fermi Explorer CEO),[8] Adi Oltean and Ezra Feilden, who are also founders of the space technology company Starcloud, together with program manager and former US Air Force officer, Garrett Jameson.[2][1][4][7] The mission was announced on September 1st, 2026 and also has aerospace industry figures Rob Meyerson, former president of Blue Origin, and Pete Worden formerly the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, as well as academics such as Alexander Wissner-Gross and entrepreneur Lauren Selig, as advisers.[1][4][9]
The mission was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, after whom the Fermi Paradox is named, since the mission is intended to make the idea of interstellar travel real, and to encourage more people to confront one of humanity’s biggest unanswered questions when we look beyond our planet: "Where is everybody?", also known as the Fermi Paradox.[3]
Fermi Explorer's primary objectives are to travel at least 99% of the distance to Alpha Centauri within 80,000 years, carry a payload of at least 1 kg, launch before the end of 2029, and remain within the project's US$15 million cost target.[4][1][10]
Alpha Centauri is approximately 4.4 light-years from Earth.[3][4] The mission's proposed trajectory would result in a closest approach to the system after approximately 77,000 years.[4][6] The project has proposed a trajectory intended to minimise fuel requirements and maximise the spacecraft's available payload.[4][5]
The proposed spacecraft is a small, solar-powered vehicle designed to use electric propulsion and largely flight-proven technology.[3][4][2] The spacecraft is expected to have a mass of approximately 100–200 kg and to reach a final heliocentric cruise velocity of about 23.6 km/s.[4][3] Its mission profile includes repeated close approaches to the Sun, with the spacecraft reaching approximately 0.42 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, followed by propulsion burns near perihelion to gradually increase its heliocentric velocity.[4][5][1] The spacecraft's planned configuration uses xenon as propellant, accounting for approximately 64% of its launch mass.[4]
The spacecraft is planned to carry a minimum payload of 1 kg within a 10 × 10 × 10 cm volume.[4][1][2] The proposed payload includes a copy of the Voyager Golden Record, as well as scientific instruments and artistic contributions selected through future solicitation programmes.[4][1][5]
The project has also proposed a programme allowing children from countries and regions around the world to contribute 300 characters in their own language to be carried aboard the spacecraft.[4][1]
Fermi Explorer has set a target of less than US$15 million for the complete mission.[1][7][11] The project is funded through donations and has published a feasibility assessment addressing the technical and financial requirements of the proposed mission.[3][5][9]
The project estimates that the probability of complete mission success may be higher than the approximately 50% historical success rate it cites for new spacecraft, while advising potential donors to assume a probability of around 50%.[4]
The Alpha Centauri system | ||
|---|---|---|
| Stars |   | |
| Planets | ||
| Proposed mission concepts | ||
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Fermi Explorer Mission a US non-profit organization that plans to launch the first spacecraft to another star. The project aims to launch a spacecraft, called Fermi Explorer, before the end of 2029 and to send the spacecraft at least 99% of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun. The proposed journey will take approximately 77,000 years, which is the optimum arrival time for least fuel and cost. The mission is designed as a low-cost interstellar spacecraft, with a target budget of less than US$15 million for its design, construction, launch and operation.
Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian and naturalized-American physicist, renowned for being the creator of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and a member of the Manhattan Project. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons". He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical and experimental physics. With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics. Fermi's first major contribution involved the field of statistical mechanics. After Wolfgang Pauli formulated his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi followed with a paper in which he applied the principle to an ideal gas, employing a statistical formulation now known as Fermi–Dirac statistics. Today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called "fermions". Pauli later postulated the existence of an uncharged invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay, to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle, which he named the "neutrino". His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction and now called weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. Through experiments inducing radioactivity with the recently discovered neutron, Fermi discovered that slow neutrons were more easily captured by atomic nuclei than fast ones, and he developed the Fermi age equation to describe this. After bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he concluded that he had created new elements. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, the new elements were later revealed to be nuclear fission products. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon. He immigrated to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team at the University of Chicago that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford Site did so the next year. At Los Alamos, he headed F Division, part of which worked on Edward Teller's thermonuclear "Super" bomb. He was present at the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, the first test of a full nuclear bomb explosion, where he used his Fermi method to estimate the bomb's yield. After the war, he helped establish the Institute for Nuclear Studies in Chicago, and served on the General Advisory Committee, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, which advised the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear matters. After the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he strongly opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on both moral and technical grounds. He was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the 1954 hearing that resulted in the denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Fermi did important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons, and he speculated that cosmic rays arose when the material was accelerated by magnetic fields in interstellar space. Many awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, including the Fermi 1 (breeder reactor), the Fermi Explorer mission, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Fermi paradox, and the synthetic element fermium, making him one of 16 scientists who have elements named after them.
Philip Johnston (born December 18, 1986) is a British-American entrepreneur and business executive. He is co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a space technology company developing orbital data centers. In November, 2025, Starcloud launched a satellite with the first NVIDIA H100, which it used to train the first AI model in space. In March 2026, Starcloud became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history, hitting a $1.1bn valuation just 17 months after completing the program. In August 2026, Starcloud raised an additional $250M at a $2.3Bn valuation, with NVIDIA, Cisco, and Benchmark investing in the round. Johnston is also the co-founder and CEO of The Fermi Explorer Mission, a non profit that will send the first spacecraft to another star, and previously co-founded Opontia, a digital brand aggregator.
The Fermi paradox is the seeming inconsistency between the lack of evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the apparently high likelihood of their existence. In simple terms, the Fermi paradox asks why, given the vast number of stars and potentially habitable planets in our observable universe, there is no clear evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi who blurted out the question—remembered by Emil Konopinski as "But where is everybody?"—during lunchtime after the conversation had already moved on to other topics. This happened at Los Alamos in 1950 with colleagues Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York. The paradox first appeared in print in a 1963 paper by Carl Sagan, and the paradox has since been more fully described by scientists. Early formulations of the paradox have also been identified in writings by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1686) and Jules Verne (1865), and by Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1933). There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox, such as suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) humans see no evidence.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.
