Last year, I was visiting my family home in Hungary, and decided to return to Australia via the Trans-Siberian Railway. With the opening up of Russia, I was able to visit en-route rocket launching facilities on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and found that, having not been paid for seven months, Soviet rocket scientists were holding a garage sale. I was able to purchase, for a few thousand Rubles and 500 Benson & Hedges cigarettes, a solid-fuel rocket booster, and have it transported to Australia as deck cargo on an oil tanker. It was then carried from Port Augusta to Coober Pedy, roof-racked on a road train.
The feature which attracted me to it, was the fact that it was 5mm narrower than a test shaft recently bored to a depth of 120 metres near Marla Roadhouse. The local Bauxite miners have donated 1220 tons of Ammonium Nitrate to the project, which will fill the bottom of the shaft. The booster will sit in the shaft on top of the Ammonium Nitrate mixture, which will be fired using incremental amounts of double-filtered Diesel, thus giving something nearer to controlled thrust, rather than an explosion. The upper stage is a refurbished exhibit from the outdoor museum display at Woomera.
Once free of the Earth’s atmosphere, the upper stage will deploy a sail of thin but strong enhanced aluminium polymer (combination Glad Wrap & Alfoil), amounting to 3.1 square kilometres to catch the "Galactic Wind", a highly energetic cosmic ray event, traced back to M87 in the Virgo cluster.
The sails will be "tacked" by computer control, and thus the probe will be steered at a constant acceleration towards Alpha Centauri A, and then slingshot back around to return to Earth.
On the return trip, the sail will act as a drogue, to slow the probe in exact proportion to it’s acceleration, so that as it approaches the Earth’s atmosphere it will become a parachute of great size, and slowing the craft in the very thinnest of upper atmosphere.
Instrumentation is still being designed, and though initial plans are for the probe to be un-manned, some miners from Andamooka believe they may be able to get a well-known tax inspector to volunteer to pilot the craft on its estimated ten year trip.