We knew to expect a paradigm shift with the end of the space shuttle program, but this is ridiculous. Mason Peck and his group of forward-thinking engineers are taking NASA’s slogan of Faster, Better, Cheaper to the extreme. Their spacecraft will cut down travel time to Alpha Centauri from thousands of years to just a few hundred, and instead of the $1.7 billion it takes to build a space shuttle, Peck’s ships can be built for an amazing $33.

I might mention that there’s no room for astronauts. In fact, if one were to try and board these spacecraft they would crush it.

Okay, maybe Peck’s Sprites, as they’re called, aren’t going to be the next manned space vehicle, but they could be the first of a new breed of satellites that are so cheap and innovative – they don’t need fuel – they could be an important addition to our satellite-based efforts to study the universe.

In stark contrast to the present approach of sending satellites costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for single missions, Peck’s team at Cornell’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering envision a swarm of wafer-sized spacecraft that sense their surroundings together and send data back to the earth in aggregate.

The spacecraft are called Sprites and they weigh about 10 grams each. Integrated circuits 3.8 cm on a side, they’re literally spacefaring computer chips. This past May the space shuttle Endeavour brought three Sprite prototypes to the International Space Station. Fixed to the station’s exterior, they are currently in the early days of a two year test to see how they stand up to the harsh elements of space....