A chain of fifty per­ma­nent sta­tions spaced a few light-weeks apart would turn the 4.25-light-year trip to Prox­i­ma Cen­tau­ri into a main­tained cor­ri­dor rather than a cen­turies-long one-shot voy­age. Short-haul fer­ries would hop between neigh­bor­ing sta­tions in about five years at 0.017c, rotat­ing crews, hand­ing off car­go, and keep­ing fail­ures local. The net­work could devel­op from robot­ic bea­cons to habi­tats, allow­ing for staged con­struc­tion and amor­tiz­ing costs through reuse. Hard prob­lems remain—power, propul­sion, dust, auton­o­my, and gen­er­a­tional institutions—but the same mod­el could lat­er extend to oth­er near­by stars.

A one-shot voy­age to Prox­i­ma Centauri—4.25 light-years, about 40 tril­lion kilometers—would last cen­turies and demand a sin­gle craft that nev­er fails. This arti­cle instead treats the gap as a trans­porta­tion cor­ri­dor: fifty per­ma­nent sta­tions spaced a few light-weeks apart, linked by short-haul fer­ries, so end-to-end trav­el still takes about 250 years but no ship or crew must endure the whole span.

Sta­tions would sit rough­ly 0.085 light-years (5,370 AU) apart, form­ing 51 nodes from a Solar Sys­tem hub to a Prox­i­ma ter­mi­nal. At about 0.017c, each hop takes rough­ly five years; light takes only 31 days between neigh­bors, enough for prac­ti­cal coor­di­na­tion. Fer­ries fly only adja­cent legs, car­ry fuel and life sup­port for a few years, and hand off car­go and pas­sen­gers at each stop. Crews rotate after one or two hops; fail­ures stay local; sta­tions store reac­tion mass, repair ves­sels, host research, and become self-gov­ern­ing communities.

Seg­ment­ing the jour­ney cuts what each ship must car­ry, enables sched­uled repairs, refu­el­ing, and crew rota­tion, and lets the net­work grow stage by stage instead of bet­ting on one gen­er­a­tion ship. Reusable docks, depots, colonies, and vehi­cles amor­tize costs. Ear­ly robot­ic bea­cons and sci­ence out­posts can boot­strap the chain before habi­tats and crewed traf­fic follow.

Hard prob­lems remain: pow­er and sta­tion-keep­ing in inter­stel­lar space, propul­sion (nuclear or beamed ener­gy rather than chem­i­cal rock­ets), dust affects at thou­sands of kilo­me­ters per sec­ond, auton­o­my under long light delays, and insti­tu­tion­al con­ti­nu­ity over gen­er­a­tions. Lat­er arti­cles will cov­er kine­mat­ics, sta­tion and fer­ry design, propul­sion, dust shield­ing, the robot­ic boot­strap, and oper­a­tions. Once built, the same cor­ri­dor mod­el could extend to oth­er near­by stars, turn­ing the near­est star from a hero­ic leap into a main­tained highway.