Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University has outlined a mission concept that would send a gram-scale spacecraft to a nearby black hole in what would be the first attempt to sample the extreme environment around an event horizon. The peer-reviewed proposal, published in the journal iScience, envisages a fleet of nanocraft accelerated by Earth-based lasers to roughly one-third of the speed of light. Under the plan, each probe would be no larger than a paper-clip and would ride a light sail driven by a multi-gigawatt laser array. At that velocity, a black hole located 20–25 light-years from Earth could be reached in about 70 years, with data transmission taking another two decades. The full mission would therefore span 80–100 years—just within a human lifetime. Bambi estimates the programme’s cost at around $1 trillion, dominated by the ground laser infrastructure. He argues that advances in photonics and miniaturised electronics could bring the technology within reach in the next 20–30 years, provided astronomers can first identify a suitably close black hole. Once on station, the nanocraft would examine whether an event horizon exists as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general relativity and study how space-time behaves in the strongest known gravitational field. Bambi concedes the idea is “speculative” and “challenging” but notes that earlier milestones—imaging a black hole and detecting gravitational waves—were also dismissed as unrealistic before technology caught up.