The launch is decades away, and the journey will take even longer ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

IF A small, scrappy group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, get their way, the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11 – the first crewed moon landing – will see a spacecraft launched to a nearby exoplanet to look for life.

The project is so new it doesn’t have a name – and most of the technology it needs doesn’t exist yet. But there’s plenty of time to work out the kinks before 2069.

“It’s very nebulous,” says Anthony Freeman at JPL, who presented the mission concept at the 2017 American Geophysical Union conference in New Orleans, …