by Paul Gilster | Sep 24, 2013 | Culture and Society |
The 100 Year Starship Symposium forces an interesting conversation simply by virtue of its name. I learned this yet again this morning when I met a neighbor out walking his dog. He knew I had been in Houston and that the subject was space travel, but he assumed we must have been talking about Mars. “No,” I replied, “we’re actually talking about a much more distant target.” His eyes lit up when I described the Houston conference, and in particular when I talked about multi-generational efforts and what achieving — or even just attempting — them could mean.
The odd thing is, I get this reaction often when talking to people about interstellar flight. Sure, you’d expect the audience at the Houston symposium to be onboard with the idea of outcomes beyond their own lifetime, but I’m finding a genuine fascination with the idea among people who otherwise have no connection with space. I frequently lament the extreme short-range nature of modern society, but it heartens me to keep encountering what seems to be a hunger to overcome it. Maybe somewhere deep within all of us, not just a few of us, there is a hard-wired impulse to make a difference over not just the coming year but the coming century.
Let’s hope so, for if that’s the case, making the pitch for long-term thinking is going to bear fruit. The other definitional matter that the 100 Year Starship name brings up is the nature of the project itself. Is it a ship that will take a century to reach its target? Is it a ship that will be built in a hundred years? When my neighbor asked that one, I told him that what really counted here was finding out how to sustain an organizational effort over an entire century. At the end of that period we may be in position to build an interstellar craft, but we can’t know the timing. What we have to master is long-haul effort that gets handed off as needed to our descendants.
Maps and Dreams
I’m swiping the title of Hugh Brody’s wonderful book on traveling the Canadian sub-arctic (a must-read if you’re not familiar with it) to point to how one person’s mapping of distant landscapes leads to another’s fascination with the place and eventual journey there. Starship planning, obviously audacious and open-ended, is about constructing multiple pathways to attack the interstellar question. In her introductory talk, 100 Year Starship leader Mae Jemison emphasized the multidisciplinary nature of the effort, pulling from the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences as well as the humanities to engage the broadest spectrum of the population:
“We need to create and inspire and maintain an environment where starflight can eventually be achieved,” Jemison added. “We need to foster explosive innovation, technical achievement, and societal advances in economics, governance, behavior, and education, not just in the hard sciences. This won’t happen without engaging people across lines of ethnicity, gender, and geography. No one organization can do it all. It is an audacious, bold venture that won’t be led by naysayers or caution. We are here to squander ourselves, squander ourselves for a purpose.”
Image: Mae Jemison delivering her opening address at the symposium.
In the following talk of the plenary session, Loretta Whitesides, who along with husband George is looking toward the next generation of suborbital flight through Virgin Galactic (George is its CEO), told the crowd that the people who go to the stars won’t be us, but people much like us. The point she was making is that if we do manage to overcome the huge challenge of starflight, we will have managed it only by developing a community that can keep the effort going, transforming its participants in the same way the much-noted ‘overview effect’ has transformed so many space travelers by letting them see their own planet from a unique perspective.
This is a kind of societal evolution that takes place one mind at a time, but we can try to communicate it through public outreach and individual conversation. I’m reminded that Mae Jemison has said her own experience of the overview effect on her flight aboard Endeavour was slightly different than what some astronauts have reported. As she told the Houston audience, she naturally felt the deep connection many have reported with the blue and green Earth, but also a surprisingly strong connection with the cosmos that surrounded it. If it’s true that nobody shows a child the sky, maybe nothing but experience in space will gradually bring enough voices to this effort to reach the kind of cultural tipping point that can think and plan centuries ahead.
Disciplines and Strategies
All of this raises questions of focus: If one thing is clear, it is that no starship will ever be built without the propulsion system to drive it to its destination. And if it is to be a starship with a human crew, no starship will ever fly without our mastery of closed-loop living systems, a subject about which we have much to learn through theory and experiment. But focusing solely on propulsion and life support would ignore the fact that starflight will be transformational in every aspect of life. Thus the relevance of John Carter McKnight’s excellent track that addressed culture, ethics and governance, of Dan Hanson’s track examining how the effort at starship building could enhance life here on Earth and Karl Aspelund’s track on systems design.
The net was broadly thrown, with Jill Tarter’s ‘State of the Universe’ panel ranging from the construction of the Square Kilometer Array to a timely update on the progress of Voyager 1, while the ‘Trending Now’ panel led by Hakeem Oluseyi addressed everything from the Colossus telescope (a particular interest of mine) to Ronke Olabisi’s discussion of growing bones, meat and other organics in the laboratory. The science fiction panel led by Levar Burton placed starflight in the context of culture and asked how we are portraying it in fiction today.
Image: The lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Houston, quiet in this morning shot, but the scene of numerous conversations as the day wore on.
I have notes on all of these events and more, and as I go through them in coming days I’ll report some of them in greater detail. But talking to my neighbor this morning reminded me of the importance of pulling interstellar ideas across many disciplines even if some of these matters can be addressed no more than theoretically. Questions of ethics aboard a starship, for example, may seem irrelevant if we have no engine to fly the starship in the first place, but it’s important to recognize that it will take more than a single century to resolve seemingly intractable problems that, if they divide humans on Earth, could destroy them over the course of a multi-generational star mission. There is also something to be said for energizing the arts by setting high goals that in turn inspire the general public.
Learning how to build science advocacy organizations, something Louis Friedman did brilliantly with the Planetary Society and which he examined in a luncheon talk, will be crucial in sustaining an effort that lasts centuries or more. So we need to be pulling in ideas across the disciplines. I’ll close today by quoting Kathleen Toerpe (Northeast Wisconsin Technical College), who is deeply involved in multidisciplinary activities for space through her work with the Astrosociology Research Institute. I’ll use her own words rather than my more fragmentary notes, lifting them from a recent comment she posted on this site in early September as she prepared to make the trip to Houston:
I’m one of those humanists and social scientists you’re including in this grand mythos of interstellar travel and I thank you for your very warm welcome to the adventure! Some of us are gathering under the umbrella of a newer academic field called “astrosociology” – a multidisciplinary group including sociologists, philosophers, poets, historians, psychologists, artists, etc.- all of us passionately researching, exploring and anticipating the human dimensions of space. We’re uncovering what connects the science of space exploration with the individuals and societies that undertake it and with the broader humanity that it intends to benefit. Our work directly benefits scientists and space research while it creates greater public awareness, knowledge, and hopefully, support for continued exploration. Myths are, by their nature, collaborative narratives. It is in community that they are created, shared and wield their power. Your reflections challenge us all to transcend disciplinary boundaries and collaborate even more profoundly toward our space-faring future.
Conferences are energizing but in some ways frustrating — there is always more to do than anyone can fit in, and multiple tracks kept me hopping from one room to another. I particularly wanted to talk to Dr. Toerpe about what she was doing at the Astrosociology Institute but failed to catch her at the right time (though I’ll try to talk her into writing something about the Institute for Centauri Dreams). Tomorrow I’ll move on in my coverage of the 100 Year Starship Symposium to review some of the discussions both in the track sessions and the panels.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 18, 2013 | Culture and Society |
My flight to Houston for the 100 Year Starship Symposium was complicated by aircraft maintenance problems, two switched flights and lost baggage (due in tonight), but I’m now ensconced in the hotel room, from which I just snapped the photo below. I’m 26 stories up and plan to go higher (to the rooftop restaurant) in a little bit.
As I did at Starship Congress, my plan is to focus my attention on taking notes and I won’t try to do any ‘live blogging’ from Houston. When I get back next week, I’ll be writing up the event over a spread of days as I try to get my notes in order. There should be plenty to talk about. Look for me on Twitter as @centauri_dreams if you’re hoping for the occasional tweet. And while I’m here, although I probably won’t be writing much on the site, I’ll take care of comment moderation as often as I can.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 17, 2012 | Culture and Society |
While I didn’t see too many technical glitches at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, I ran into plenty of them in my own attempts to cover the event. The banquet hall where the opening ceremonies were held — and where the plenary sessions occurred each day — was impervious to the hotel’s WiFi, so that I was unable to use Twitter. Friday’s technical sessions in the conference rooms went fine, and I managed to send out a steady stream of tweets from the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track. But halfway through the Saturday sessions, Twitter itself went down. I tried all afternoon to get on, but though my Net connection was strong, Twitter wouldn’t come up.
Image: Early arrivals setting up at the opening plenary session for the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Everything in order but the WiFi.
My experience with US Airways was about the same. The two flights out to Houston were uneventful, but coming back I was on an aircraft that reached new levels of passenger compression. With my knees hard up against the seat in front of me and that seat tilted back to maximum extent into my face, I could only close my eyes and pretend I was someplace else. We’ve all gone through things like this on packed flights, but I was reminded again why I have my 1000-mile rule. If a trip is anything less than 1000 miles, I’m going by rail or car. Period.
The Saturday science sessions were top-notch (congratulations to track chairman Eric Davis for his excellent work throughout the conference). Joe Ritter (University of Hawaii) gave an eye-opening talk about metamaterials, which he believes can reduce the cost of telescope fabrication by a factor of 100. This is heartening given the need to deploy big mirrors in space to look for and analyze exoplanet atmospheres. Joe’s team is looking at mirrors with what he describes as ‘photonic muscle,’ material that minimizes ambient light and can respond actively to conditions. Think of today’s adaptive optics extended in entirely new directions and available in ultralight models. A Hubble size mirror using some of these materials would weigh just 1 pound.
If you’re thinking not just of ground- or space-based telescopes but of starships, Joe’s huge, lightweight mirrors could be the basis of communication systems. For that matter, metamaterials like these can become involved in power generation and thermal regulation. There are even solar sail possibilities. In many ways the mission architectures becoming available to us will depend upon the advances in materials technology that this kind of work represents.
Vince Teofilo (Energy Innovations) ran through a conceptual design for a starship ark that he has been working on for the Space Colony Earth project, which involves repositories on Earth, the Moon and a starship that are seen as ways of preserving digital data and human DNA information. What Space Colony Earth has in mind is guarding against mass extinctions of the kind that felled the dinosaurs. A robotic long-haul starship of the kind Vince described would target a star with an Earth-like planet and would include experiments to be run en-route to provide data for future, faster interstellar missions. Among the propulsion options are an inertial electrostatic confinement space thruster developed by George Miley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), though Vince examined a range of alternatives.
Image: The view from outside my 19th floor room at the Hyatt Regency. An MD friend of mine, back in the days when this kind of hotel design was just coming in, looked up at such a scene at a conference and exclaimed “This is Babylon!” Well not quite, but the Hyatt was a good venue.
Icarus Interstellar was all over the science sessions, and the two I attended on Saturday covered recent work involving what the team is learning about the original Daedalus design. Robert Freeland (Podtrac), discussing a paper he did in conjunction with science fiction author Stephen Baxter, noted that the Daedalus team’s calculations had largely been validated, though some aspects were in need of a tune-up. Remember that Daedalus came out of the 1970s, its team working in loose association using slide rules and pencils rather than computers. Freeland described an early Icarus iteration that would reduce payload to 50 tons from Daedalus’ 450 thanks to advances in miniaturization, with an additional set of fuel tanks for each stage and full deceleration into the Alpha Centauri system. Mission time: just under 100 years.
You would think that an Alpha Centauri probe might swing by Proxima Centauri in some way on its way to Centauri A and B, but the scenario turns out to be surprisingly difficult to manage given the speeds involved on the way to the ultimate destination, as Freeland described. Splitting off a flyby probe targeting Proxima after the acceleration of the main probe is perhaps a possibility, but the primary probe still decelerates into the Centauri AB system, with the latter probe dividing into separate probes for the exploration of each star’s (assumed) planetary system.
Still up in the air are issues like inertial confinement fusion and whether it will become the final choice of the Icarus design team. The continuing work at the National Ignition Facility has shown how tricky it is to compress a fuel pellet with lasers symmetrically. A final, major question: How do you do a re-start if the system shuts down? The Daedalus Final Report did not address the problem, and the Icarus team will explore this along with the question of mis-fires and how they could damage the reaction chamber.
Image: Hard at work in the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track.
Pat Galea, who gave three papers on Icarus topics, presented his third in place of author Adam Crowl, who could not be in Houston. Crowl was looking at efficient braking mechanisms for an interstellar probe entering its destination system, wondering about the feasibility of magnetic sail braking in which an artificial magnetosphere interacts with the interstellar medium. The magnetosphere itself is created with a huge ring of superconducting wire attached to the vehicle. Magsails turn out to help reduce overall system mass significantly when compared to other methods in a Daedalus-class vehicle.
Finally, Rob Adams (MSFC) discussed the Decade Module Two (DM2) device his team is reassembling after its donation to the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Located at the UAH Aerophysics Laboratory at nearby Redstone Arsenal, the device was originally developed to model the effects of thermonuclear explosions, but can be productively put to work in a variety of fusion experiments ranging from magnetic nozzle tests to the simulation of a solar mass ejection. In a so-called Z-pinch, current applied to plasma by a large bank of capacitors creates a magnetic field that pinches the plasma into a small cylinder to reach fusion conditions. See Z-Pinch: Firing Up Fusion in Huntsville for more.
Image: Rob Adams describing the DM2 and its potential.
Can plasma explosions generated by the Z-pinch be directed into a flow of thrust of the kind that would drive a spacecraft? Fusion-pulsed propulsion may one day be practical, but it will take experiments with equipment like the DM2 to help us find out. All this work is obviously in the early stages of development and it won’t be until the spring of next year that high-power testing could begin, assuming the assembly continues to go well and funding is forthcoming. Adams noted that the DM2 facility will also be made available to outside experimenters.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 7, 2012 | Culture and Society |
The 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium begins next week, with the recently announced news that former president Bill Clinton will serve as honorary chair for the event. I’m not sure whether a US president has ever spoken about starships before, but what Clinton said was this: “This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space, all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on earth.” The symposium takes a decidedly multi-disciplinary theme, with speakers on topics ranging from engineering to ethics, philosophy, the social sciences and biology.
Our recent discussions about experimenting with self-enclosed ecosystems flow naturally into the upcoming event in light of the range of topics to be covered. In addition to the speakers and scientific papers, four workshops have been announced. Let me pull some excerpts on the workshops directly off the 100 Year Starship page:
Workshop 1: Research Priorities for the First Ten of 100 Years
The capabilities required to successfully mount a human interstellar mission are numerous and daunting. Yet, we must start somewhere. Requirements range from achieving relativistic (approaching light speed) velocities and navigation, radiation shielding, robust crew and passenger health, training, dynamics, optimized skill mix, culture and compatibility, to selecting destinations, self-renewing machine and life support systems, and financial investment.
Workshop 2: Path to the Stars—Evolutionary or Revolutionary
Is the best approach to reaching the stars a giant leap or incremental baby steps? Is there a real and necessary requirement to colonize our solar system before attempting to travel to another star? Is a one-way trip ethical? Is it possible to achieve such an audacious goal as interstellar flight with a “slow and steady wins the race” strategy or does that method risk stagnation?
Workshop 3: The Mission: Human, Robotic or Reconstituted?
Some argue that taking humans along not only complicates the mission and equipment, but may also make an interstellar mission anytime in the foreseeable future extremely improbable.
Workshop 4: Is It Everybody’s Space Mission?
Who should and can participate in the quest for human interstellar space travel? How should that participation be facilitated, encouraged and measured? Should those who have technical backgrounds or declared “interstellar first” have the front row seats? Is this the purview of certain countries, socioeconomic groups or cultures?
Attendees can register to participate in workshops on the website.
Image: The Project Daedalus design, the first fully developed study of an interstellar craft, created by the British Interplanetary Society in the 1970s. Icarus Interstellar, a partner in the 100 Year Starship effort, is developing Project Icarus as the successor to Daedalus. The ongoing design study will doubtless be much in the air in Houston. Credit: Adrian Mann.
Among the speakers at the symposium will be, in addition to symposium chair Mae Jemison, anthropologist Johnetta B. Cole, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, space journalist Miles O’Brien, SETI Institute co-founder Jill Tarter, and two figures well known to Star Trek fans: Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura from the first Star Trek series), and LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Although I’ll mostly be there for the scientific papers, it will be fun to see what the dose of popular entertainment lore can bring to the proceedings. Track chairs include Eric Davis (Institute for Advanced Studies-Austin ), Amy Millman (Springboard Enterprises), David Alexander (Rice University) and Ian O’Neill (Discovery News).
For those of you coming in late on all this, the 100 Year Starship effort grows out of seed money provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Last year’s conference in Orlando took place a few months before the award was allocated to The Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named in honor of astronaut Mae Jemison’s mother. The winning proposal was crafted by Jemison’s team in partnership with Icarus Interstellar, which continues to explore research and development dedicated to interstellar hardware, and the Foundation for Enterprise Development. From a recent news release from 100YSS:
In its first year, 100YSS will seek investors, establish membership opportunities, encourage public participation in research projects and develop the vision for interstellar exploration. 100 Year Starship will bring in experts from myriad fields to help achieve its goal – utilizing not only scientists, engineers, doctors, technologists, researchers, sociologists and computer experts, but also architects, writers, artists, entertainers and leaders in government, business, economics, ethics and public policy. 100YSS will also collaborate with existing space exploration and advocacy efforts from both private enterprise and the government. In addition, 100YSS will establish a scientific research institute, The Way, whose major emphasis will be speculative, long-term science and technology.
The Houston event will run September 13-16, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency with details available on the 100 Year Starship site. Having handed off initial funding to the new organization, DARPA has stepped back to let the 100 Year Starship grow on its own. Thus Houston marks the first major event 100YSS has undertaken, and I’m hoping the sessions will have much of the same multi-disciplinary sparkle that enlivened Orlando one year ago.
by Paul Gilster | Aug 15, 2012 | Culture and Society |
“The future never just happened, it was created.” The quote is from Will and Ariel Durant, the husband and wife team who collaborated on an eleven-volume history of civilization that always used to be included in Book of the Month deals, which is how many of us got our copies. I’m glad to see the Durants’ quotation brought into play by the 100 Year Starship organization in the service of energizing space exploration. It’s a call to create, to work, to push our ideas.
100 Year Starship (100YSS) puts the Durants’ thinking into practice at the second 100 Year Starship Public Symposium, September 13-16 at the Hyatt Regency in Houston. The event promises academic presentations, science fiction panels, workshops, classes and networking possibilities for those in the aerospace community and the public at large. My hope is that the gathering will kindle some of the same enthusiasm we saw last October in Orlando, when the grant from DARPA that created the 100 Year Starship had yet to be assigned and the halls of the Orlando Hilton filled up with starship aficionados. For more on the event, check the 100YSS symposium page.
Image: The track chair panel from last year’s symposium in Orlando. Credit: 100YSS.
DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) provided the seed money, but 100 Year Starship is now in the hands of Mae Jemison, whose Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence will develop the idea with partners Icarus Interstellar (the people behind Project Icarus, the re-envisioning of the Project Daedalus starship) and the Foundation for Enterprise Development. And as we’ve discussed before, the 100 Year Starship refers not to a century-long star mission but to an organization that can survive for a century to nurture the starship idea, the thinking being that a century from now we will have made major progress on the interstellar front. It’s a gutsy and optimistic time frame and I hope it’s proven right.
The upcoming symposium will take place the week of the 50th anniversary of president Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University exhorting Americans to land on the Moon, so it’s fitting that former president Bill Clinton has agreed to serve as honorary chair for the event. “This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space,” said Clinton, “all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on Earth.” 100YSS is collaborating with Rice University to integrate activities, which will include a salute to fifty years of human space flight at the Johnson Space Center.
The goal is for a multidisciplinary gathering, as a 100YSS news release makes clear:
100 Year Starship will bring in experts from myriad fields to help achieve its goal — utilizing not only scientists, engineers, doctors, technologists, researchers, sociologists and computer experts, but also architects, writers, artists, entertainers and leaders in government, business, economics, ethics and public policy. 100YSS will also collaborate with existing space exploration and advocacy efforts from both private enterprise and the government. In addition, 100YSS will establish a scientific research institute, The Way, whose major emphasis will be speculative, long-term science and technology.
The 2012 symposium is titled ‘Transition to Transformation…The Journey Begins.’ According to the organization, the goals for the gathering include:
- Identifying research directions and priorities
- Understanding methods to assess, transform and deploy space-related technologies to improve daily life
- Fostering ways to identify and integrate partnerships and partnering opportunities, social structures, cultural awareness and global momentum essential to the 100 year challenge
I see that three track chairs have already been announced. David Alexander (Rice University) will be in charge of a special session on Future Visions, while Eric Davis (Institute for Advanced Studies – Austin) is to be track chair for Time-Distance Solutions. Amy Millman (Springboard Enterprises) chairs a special session called Interstellar Aspiration – Commercial Perspiration. More news on the other track chairs and session topics and papers as it becomes available.
The opportunity before us is to keep the Durants’ quotation in mind: “The future never just happened, it was created.” It’s true on the level of civilizations and on the level of individuals. I’m hoping you can create the opportunity to make it to Houston to see how 100 Year Starship is evolving and to join the scientists, engineers, public policy experts, entertainers and the rest who will be focusing on the issues of interstellar flight. These go well beyond propulsion to include life support, robotics, economics, intelligent systems, communications and more. If it’s anything like last year’s event in Orlando, this second symposium should help move interstellar studies forward.
