There's a star nearly 5 light-years from Earth. Stephen Hawking is sending a spacecraft to it

The biggest problem is going to be communication. Both ways.
Voyager 1 & 2 have a 12 foot dish with a 23 watt transmitter.
A cell phone only has a 3 watt (short term) transmitter.
If you change to lasers you shrink the dish to a smaller lens. But still very big.
I doubt you could lower the power by much.
And that won't extend much beyond our solar system.

An alternative maybe a string of small probes powered by the same laser beam.
You could then use a relay system for communication .
That also gives you redundancy overall.

The next big problem is the size of science instruments.
You can't pack much into a cell phone.