Could we send a spacecraft to a black hole?

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai—and he recently released a paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, about what it would take to send a gram-sized probe to a nearby black hole.

Unfortunately, we do not know of any “nearby” ones—at least not yet. The closest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which is roughly 1,560 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. However, we only know Gaia BH1’s position because it has a slight gravitational pull on a nearby companion star. There are likely many more invisible black holes in our galactic neighborhood that do not have such telltale signs.

According to the paper, the Milky Way likely contains about 100 million stellar-mass black holes. That is not a typo—there are most likely hundreds of millions of black holes the size of a star floating around our galaxy. Crucially, 92% of them are isolated, without a companion star to illuminate them—meaning they would be essentially invisible because they suck up all the light directed their way. But, according to Bambi’s paper, there should be one stellar-mass black hole for roughly every 1,500 cubic parsecs (about 52,000 cubic light-years)—keep in mind that the Milky Way has an estimated volume of 150 cubic kiloparsecs.

From a statistical standpoint, this offers a tantalizing possibility—there could be an unseen black hole within 20–25 light-years of Earth. To be clear, it would pose no threat to our solar system at that distance—but it would offer us the opportunity to send a specially designed probe to visit it within a human lifetime. We would just have to find it first, and Bambi suggests we could do so by watching the radiation the black hole would emit as it swallowed up gas while traveling through Local Interstellar Clouds. Our current multiwavelength astronomical surveys could likely pick up that signal.

So, let’s say we do find one nearby—and we decide we want to send a probe to it. Rockets are out of the question—due to the “tyranny of the rocket equation,” they would take thousands of years to reach a black hole that is even a few light-years away. The best option, at least from a theoretical standpoint, is a laser-pushed solar sail.

Lasers do not transmit much force, so the design of such a system is critical. It would comprise two major parts: the “chip,” which consists of a gram-sized microchip housing the navigation, scientific and communication instruments, and the sail, which, in the paper’s telling, would be a 10 m² dielectric metamaterial light sail. That sail would be pushed by a massive laser designed to accelerate the entire assembly to one-third the speed of light in just 17 minutes.

At that speed, it would take between 60 and 70 years to reach a black hole 20–25 light-years away. Unfortunately, there is no way to slow down upon entering the system, so the probe would have to make a flyby of the black hole, collect as much data as possible as quickly as it could and then send that complex data back to Earth, which would take another 20–25 years. Ultimately, the entire mission would last 80–100 years, most likely outlasting the engineers and scientists who originally began work on it.

To put it bluntly, we do not yet have the technology for such a mission. A gram-sized chip that can withstand a decades-long trip at interstellar speeds yet still send back coherent scientific data over a 20-light-year gap is beyond our current engineering capability. So is a space-based laser that could push such a system to those speeds. Not to mention the fact that we do not even have a known black hole that we can aim at at this point. And, unfortunately, one of our best shots at developing such technology, Breakthrough Starshot, was discontinued in September 2025.

In theory, though, none of these challenges are insurmountable. They just require better engineering. And there are already working groups being formed to develop systems for science, instrumentation and communications, with a planned international conference to take place on the subject in the summer of 2027. We certainly will not have a fully functional system design by then, but every step toward tackling some of those challenges brings us one step closer to actually sending a mission to a black hole. We just have to find one nearby first.

Who’s behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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