Getting to Proxima Centauri b will take a lot of new technologies, but there are increasingly exciting reasons to do so. Both public and private efforts have started seriously looking at ways to make it happen, but so far, there has been one significant roadblock to the journey—propulsion.

To solve that problem, Christopher Limbach, now a professor at the University of Michigan, is working on a novel type of beamed propulsion that utilizes both a particle beam and a laser to overcome that technology’s biggest weakness.

According to their calculations, a 5g probe like the one that the Breakthrough Initiatives project is working on could be pushed up to 10% of the speed of light, allowing it to reach Proxima b in 43 years.

Alternatively, they also calculated that a much larger probe of around 1kg could reach the system in around 57 years. That would allow for a much more exciting payload, even if the probe would zoom through the Proxima Centauri system at a significant fraction of the speed of light.