by Paul Gilster | Aug 15, 2011 | Missions |
Anyone who looks back on Robert Heinlein’s ‘juvenile’ novels, twelve books written for young adults between 1947 and 1958, as inspiration for his current work gets my attention. I loved every one of those novels, particularly Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Starman Jones (1953), but David Neyland says it was Time for the Stars (1956) that got him thinking about the 100 Year Starship Study. If you’ve been keeping up with Centauri Dreams, you know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which handles cutting-edge research and development for the US military, is putting on a starship symposium this fall in Orlando, FL.
This follows up on the earlier DARPA Request for Information and will lead to the award of $500,000 or so in seed money to an organization that can best pursue the study’s goals. Neyland, who is director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, has been explaining what the study is all about to newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which ran a story on it on August 6. Heinlein’s books came up naturally in the interview, for it turns out that Neyland was quite a science fiction reader in his youth and found Time for the Stars a natural fit with his mission to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers with the dream of starflight. The key to the linkage is Heinlein’s use of a foundation that would facilitate long-term thinking and planning.
Thus the Long Range Foundation, which in the novel creates technologies that take generations to deliver, but eventually benefit not a single government or corporation but the entire species. In the book, twins Tom and Pat Bartlett turn out to have telepathic talents that allow them to communicate with each other instantaneously, and other twins display the same gift. It’s a useful trait because it appears that using such twins is the only way to stay in touch with a far-ranging starship. Thus a representative of the Long Range Foundation comes to visit the twins and their father, where we learn about the background of the organization, as told by Tom Bartlett:
Its coat of arms reads: “Bread Cast Upon the Waters,” and its charter is headed: “Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants.” The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers’ fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn’t enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn’t show results for ten generations, if ever … something like how to control the weather (they’re working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.
It turns out, of course, that a foundation like this pays off in a big way, having developed a number of exploratory starships called ‘torchships’ that can reach a substantial percentage of the speed of light, more than enough for time dilation to kick in. And as the young Bartlett reflects upon a school paper he has written on it, he realizes that the Long Range Foundation (LRF) has been having the desired effect for some time:
Mr. McKeefe had told us to estimate the influence, if any, of LRF on the technology “yeast-form” growth curve; either I should have flunked the course or LRF had kept the curve from leveling off early in the 21st century – I mean to say, the “cultural inheritance,” the accumulation of knowledge and wealth that keeps us from being savages, had increased greatly as a result of the tax-free status of such non-profit research corporations. I didn’t dream up that opinion; there are figures to prove it. What would have happened if the tribal elders had forced Ugh to hunt with the rest of the tribe instead of staying home and whittling out the first wheel while the idea was bright in his mind?
Neyland credits Heinlein, then, with the notion that inspired the 100 Year Starship Study, but he also points to Jules Verne, whose From the Earth to the Moon appeared in 1865. The point of such books isn’t that they were accurate in terms of the actual technologies involved — Verne shot his crew off to the Moon from a giant cannon in ways that would have mashed them to a pulp — but that they inspired people to think about the larger topic of traveling on such a momentous journey. And Neyland noticed that it was just over 100 years later that Apollo 11 set down at the Sea of Tranquility. Like Verne, then, we may not have all the answers about starflight (to say the least) but a starship study may inspire people to ask the right questions and think big.
At a press conference in June, Neyland spoke to journalists about the study (see this Centauri Dreams story on the event), noting that in the Request for Information period that produced over 150 responses, some people had misconstrued the study’s intent. DARPA has no plans to build a starship, in other words, but to develop understanding about how research into such long range matters can be conducted, and to encourage the inevitable spinoffs as such studies are pursued. Hence the planned award to a single group that can become the locus of interstellar studies over a long time period (and if none is deemed suitable, DARPA won’t disburse the money). Here’s how he describes the study’s true goals, as told to the Times:
A lot of folks think that we’re asking for somebody to come in with a plan on how to build a starship. That’s actually the wrong answer. What we’re looking for is an intuitive understanding of the process of inspiring research and development that comes up with tangible products.
“Products” doesn’t mean physical products, but might be a new computer algorithm, a new kind of physics, a new set of mathematics, a new philosophical or religious construct, a new way of growing grain hydroponically. The organization needs to have the gestalt of how to inspire that kind of research.
Will we, in the same hundred year stretch that separated Verne from Apollo, develop the technologies we need for an actual trip between the stars? It’s an energizing thought, but from our perspective today we have no way of knowing. Nonetheless, the idea of creating an organization that can shepherd various approaches to a starship — and this is a multi-disciplinary undertaking that ranges from physics to biology to sociology and more — is one that surely captures the imagination. What spinoffs it might generate along the way are open to conjecture. Unlike so much in today’s world, the project is inherently long-term, looks out well beyond current lifetimes, and asks what will produce results not just for us but for future generations as well.
The agenda for the 100 Year Starship Study symposium is now available online [but see Jim Benford’s comment below]. And if Heinlein’s Time for the Stars is what led David Neyland to this, maybe it’s time for me to re-read it. “We know the questions to ask, but we don’t know all the questions to ask,” Neyland told the Times. “We can hypothesize where we want to get to, but it’s a pretty broad target that we’re aiming for.” A broad target indeed, and it’s high time we began gathering the resources that, if interstellar flight one day proves not just possible but practical, will eventually lead us to a mission.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 16, 2011 | Research Tools |
Technology fails at the damnedest times, which is particularly ironic when discussing something as futuristic as a starship. But then, a starship launched in a hundred or more years won’t be worrying about small cassette recorders like my little Olympus, which chewed up the tape on which I was recording the June 16 teleconference held by DARPA’s David Neyland about the 100 Year Starship Study. Fortunately, I am a wizard at note-taking by hand, which comes from my love of fountain pens (I collect and repair vintage instruments) and enjoyment of script on a yellow legal pad. I always take notes by hand as well as taping where possible, a good thing because I didn’t realize what had happened to the tape until after the teleconference had ended.
Neyland, who is director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, is an engaging man with a bit of a penchant for science fiction — he mentioned Heinlein as an inspiration, but also gave credit to Jules Verne. After all, it was all the way back in 1865 that Verne came up with From the Earth to the Moon, a remarkable achievement, Neyland noted, when you considered that the US was just coming out of the Civil War at that time. Yet Verne’s imagination not only delivered an idea, but also managed to communicate the excitement of a lunar voyage to later generations. That 100-year time interval fed into Neyland’s thinking about what might come to fruition another century from now, and conversations with Pete Worden at NASA Ames firmed up the idea.
The 100 Year Starship is intended as a small study that will produce ancillary benefits. If you think back to DARPA’s role in the technology of today, Neyland said, what comes to mind right away is the Internet. DARPA did not, contrary to some popular accounts, invent the Internet. What it did do was to come up with ways to connect wired computers and facilitate the exchange of data between them. You can find other examples, as Neyland did: GPS technology received early DARPA attention in the 1960s, while the methods by which cellular telephone towers exchange information, used all over the world, were another early DARPA investment.
Can a starship study produce ancillary benefits? Presumably it can, and those benefits might run across a wide spectrum of human needs starting with energy. Neyland likened what the 100 Year Starship Study is trying to do to the early space program, recalling that many of the benefits from that effort simply faded into commonplace reality as time went by. “If you’ve ever gone into a store and bought a DeWalt drill,” he noted, “you probably don’t think about the fact that cordless drill and battery technology like this goes back to tools needed in the space program.”
So where is all this going? Centauri Dreams readers will recall that there was a conference in California last January in which issues about starship development, ranging all the way from the physics involved to philosophy and ethics, were discussed. A synopsis of the workshop is about to be released on the 100 Year Starship Study Web site.
Addendum: The synopsis is now available.
We’ve recently talked about the study’s Request for Information, and published two responses in these pages. Neyland said there were over 150 responses to the RFI, but acknowledged that they ranged across the board, from serious examinations of the issue to applications to join the starship’s crew (about as big a misreading of what the 100 Year Starship Study is trying to accomplish as is imaginable).
A Request for Proposals will be out by mid-summer, followed by a symposium in Orlando — I’ve already posted the DARPA news release on that one. In November, a grant will be provided to a single organization or individual, assigning what is left of the original seed money, $1 million of which came from DARPA and $100,000 from NASA — the grant should total in the vicinity of $500,000. Making the case for why their organization should be awarded the grant will be the work of those proposing ideas through the RFP process, at which point, when the grant is awarded, Neyland said that NASA and DARPA will both walk away from the effort. It will be up to the winner of the grant to turn the 100 Year Starship idea into a long-term commitment.
So there you are. The idea is to seed a project that will produce spin-offs ranging from agriculture to propulsion to ethics and environmental issues, in the DARPA way of funding new efforts and letting them bloom. Benefits should accrue in research and education along the way, with success in developing the work leading to a cycle of investments that can bring more money in to become a self-sustaining effort. So I stress again, the 100 Year Starship Study (to which the Tau Zero Foundation, among others, will be making a proposal) is not about building a starship. It is about solving problems that will one day have to be solved, with spinoffs along the way, and the hope that the technologies developed may one day evolve into the real thing.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 15, 2011 | Research Tools |
We’re keeping a close eye on the 100 Year Starship Study, and with the call for papers for its upcoming conference just issued, I want to run this verbatim.
Addendum: The DARPA teleconference for the 100 Year Starship Study ended about 1215 EST. I’m compiling my notes and should have something up about it either later this afternoon or tomorrow.
DARPA Encourages Individuals and Organizations to Look to the Stars; Issues Call for Papers for 100 Year Starship Study Public Symposium
In 1865, Jules Verne put forward a seemingly impossible notion in From Earth to the Moon: he wrote about building a giant space gun that would rocket men to the moon. Just over a century later, the impossible became reality when Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon’s surface in 1969.
A century can fundamentally change our understanding of our universe and reality. Man’s desire to explore space and achieve the seemingly impossible is at the center of the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA Ames Research Center (serving as execution agent), are working together to convene thought leaders dealing with the practical and fantastic issues man needs to address to achieve interstellar flight one hundred years from now.
DARPA and NASA Ames Research Center are soliciting abstracts for papers and/or topics/members for discussion panels, to be presented at the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium to be held in Orlando, Florida from September 30 through October 2, 2011.
The symposium is expected to attract roughly hundreds of people from around the world. Speaking abstracts for papers and proposed panels should be submitted online at www.100yss.org by 2:00 pm ET on Thursday, July 8, 2011.
“This won’t just be another space technology conference – we’re hoping that ethicists, lawyers, science fiction writers, technologists and others, will participate in the dialog to make sure we’re thinking about all the aspects of interstellar flight,” said David Neyland, director of the Tactical Technology Office for DARPA. “This is a great opportunity for people with interesting ideas to be heard, which we believe will spur further thought, dreaming and innovation.”
The conference will include a series of tracks. Individuals may submit speaking abstracts directly related to these topics, or they can propose entirely different ideas.
- Time-Distance Solutions [propulsion, time/space manipulation and/or dilation, near speed of light navigation, faster than light navigation, observations and sensing at near speed of light or faster than light]
- Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations [education as a mission, who goes, who stays, to profit or not, economies in space, communications back to earth, political ramifications, round-trip legacy investments and assets left behind]
- Philosophical, and Religious Considerations [why go to the stars, moral and ethical issues, implications of finding habitable worlds, implications of finding life elsewhere, implications of being left behind]
- Biology and Space Medicine [physiology in space, psychology in space, human life suspension (e.g., cryogenic), medical facilities and capabilities in space, on-scene (end of journey) spawning from genetic material]
- Habitats and Environmental Science [to have gravity or not, space and radiation effects, environmental toxins, energy collection and use, agriculture, self-supporting environments, optimal habitat sizing]
- Destinations [criteria for destination selection, what do you take, how many destinations and missions, probes versus journeys of faith]
- Communication of the Vision [storytelling as a means of inspiration, linkage between incentives, payback and investment, use of movies, television and books to popularize long term research and long term journeys]
DARPA contends that the useful, unanticipated consequences of such research – benefits from improved propulsion to energy storage and life support – can ultimately benefit the Department of Defense and to NASA, as well as the private and commercial sector.
The 100 Year Starship Study aims to culminate in the creation of a self-sustaining organization that will tackle all the issues and challenges inherent in long duration interstellar space flight. Additional information about the project may be found by visiting www.100yss.org. The public symposium is intended to seed creative energy to “kick-start” long term research goals.
by Paul Gilster | Jun 6, 2011 | Research Tools |
by Marc Millis
“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a study to inspire the first steps in the next era of space exploration—a journey between the stars.” So reads the Request for Information document (RFI) that DARPA released recently, seeking ideas for organization, business model and approach for a self-sustaining investment vehicle to study these matters. Note that word ‘study,’ because what DARPA talks about in its recent RFI is this: “The 100 Year StarshipTM Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible.”
We’ve talked about the 100 Year Starship study before, particularly in Marc Millis’ article on his participation at the first meeting held to discuss the idea. Now Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, is releasing his response to the RFI. In coming days, we’ll look at responses from the Project Icarus team as well, in an attempt to fill you in on where things stand. Look for the Call for Papers for an upcoming conference on the 100 Year Starship study as part of this coverage.
?SUBMISSION TO THE
REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (DARPA-SN-11-41)
100 YEAR STARSHIP [ORGANIZATION] STUDY
Marc G Millis
Tau Zero Foundation
P.O. Box 26027
Fairview Park, OH 44126
Organizations that can sustain progress for more than a century already exist (universities), but the goal to create starships introduces further challenges. Since acquiring funds, managing endowments, making nominal progress, and longevity are already possible, this submission concentrates on the following less obvious organizational challenges for making the game- changing advances and world-scale investments necessary for star flight:
- Demonstrate that contributions to the new 100-yr starship organization will produce more progress than can be achieved through contributions to existing venues.
- Accommodate world-wide interests and concerns, since interstellar flight is an endeavor that affects all humanity.
- Ensure that the organization stays true to its mission rather than devolving to just serving its managing employees (a common pitfall).
- Balance the need for continually acquiring fresh insights (to avoid group-think, stagnation, parochialism) with the stability needed to stay focused on the mission.
- Provide flexibility to adapt to unforeseeable opportunities and constraints.
- Balance resources across the small seedling investigations needed to discover methods of interstellar flight, with the larger work to apply those discoveries to create mission infrastructure and starships.
- Balance investments across both evolutionary and revolutionary approaches (applying lessons from history about disruptive pioneers).
- Distinguish potentially viable revolutionary approaches (that sound crazy at first), from the more numerous, genuinely crazy ideas.
- Establish win-win intellectual property agreements where top-innovators will choose to work with the 100-yr organization, and where the organization also reaps sufficient returns to sustain its mission.
- Disseminate information responsibly to the public, without disclosing too many technical details that might compromise future revenue generation.
Lessons from different types of organizations:
NASA’s charter makes it the expected organization to create starships, but NASA (and its supporting aerospace community) have evolved per typical patterns to become short-sighted and constrained to their founding legacy. This offers lessons about stagnation and self-absorption.
Educational institutions continue to advance knowledge applicable to interstellar missions, but they do not have the organizational capacity to align and apply all those individual elements to build starships, or the international authority to launch interstellar missions. They also often lack the ability to investigate revolutionary ideas since such ideas pose risk to their reputations. Their revenues include tuitions, licensing of innovations, and huge donations from successful, loyal alumni. Their intellectual resources include a continual flow of young students with fresh ideas, moderated by seasoned professionals.
Professional and public societies, such as the British Interplanetary Society (78 yrs old), provide venues for vetting and advancing new, unconventional ideas, but they lack the infrastructure, coherency, and resources to launch ambitious missions.
Corporations build devices that apply the knowledge gained from universities and societies, but need huge investments to build huge devices (starships) – commitments on the scale of governments. A pitfall of corporations is that they typically follow a pattern of emergence, achievement, and eventual obsolescence. The do not inherently have the longevity to pursue a cause, but rather are optimum for introducing new products.
Governments have the authority and resources to bring such notions to fruition, but are typically mired in internal bickering on near-term crises that preclude applying resources consistently to solve the long-range and difficult-to-comprehend ambitions… until those become a crisis.
And finally, although religious organizations have been used as models for longevity, their product (a belief system) is far easier to produce than scientific discoveries and functional space hardware. Additionally, given competing belief systems (plus righteousness), religions can evoke prejudice and conflicts that can impede the kind of world-scale collaborations needed for interstellar flight.
Scattered amongst all these venues are the elements for discovering methods for, and eventually launching, interstellar missions. Seeking the one best organizational structure to bring this to fruition will be a subjective exercise at best. There is no way to determine, rigorously and impartially, which methods will guarantee success. And if history is any indicator, any structure implemented today will have to adapt to unforeseeable constraints and opportunities. The notion of one, lasting organizational model might not be possible.
Instead, consider this recurring theme in history regarding achieving what was once impossible:
- [Individual level] Pioneers, inspired by the possibilities and having the creativity and competence to make progress, create new knowledge toward solving those grand challenges. (e.g., Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, von Braun, etc.)
- [Group level] Those pioneers inspire more people to attempt to implement those visions, and typically volunteer organizations emerge that dabble in those ideas. After cycles of failures and successes, noteworthy progress results. (e.g. the first rocketry clubs, American Interplanetary Society, British Interplanetary Society, etc.)
- [Corporations and Governments] Once a threshold of success has been demonstrated, corporations or governments apply those possibilities to their own interests (e.g., German V2 missiles, American Apollo Moon landing, etc).
While this pattern is not the only way that such things happen, this pattern happens often enough to suggest this strategy:
Find today’s pioneers, support them to accelerate their progress, and then filter out the best prospects. Once sufficiently viable approaches emerge – invest to bring those approaches to fruition.
When it comes to interstellar flight, none of the technical approaches that exist today are fully viable. At least 3 different estimates peg human readiness for an interstellar mission to be roughly 2-centuries away. This topic is still at the stage of finding pioneers and seeing what develops. It is no coincidence that new volunteer societies are emerging, such as the “Tau Zero Foundation,” “Peregrinus Interstellar,” “Project Icarus,” “Life Boat Foundation,” and others that are looking toward pioneering work to solve the challenges related to interstellar flight. This is a natural progression, unfolding today.
Similarly to how DARPA and NASA-Ames are looking outside of NASA to solve these challenges, so too did this author. After leading NASA’s “Breakthrough Propulsion Physics” project that addressed revolutionary ideas to solve the propulsion challenges of interstellar flight, this author realized that NASA was no longer the place for such aspirations. In 2010, an early retirement from NASA allowed full time to be devoted to the “Tau Zero Foundation” – an international network of roughly 40 accomplished researchers and journalists who pursue interstellar flight to provoke longer-range and higher-payoff progress. The foundation’s work is published in various journals and then conveyed to the public via the ‘Centauri Dreams’ news forum .
The organizational structure of Tau Zero was designed to take advantage of these historic patterns and avoid the recurring pitfalls. This includes methods to recognize and pursue disruptive, game-changing advances. It also includes methods to find the productive middle ground between wishful thinking and pedantic disdain. And as a result, Tau Zero’s practitioners are making progress. In 2010 they produced 2 books, 13 journal articles (or book chapters), 22 conference presentations, 22 media articles, plus 5 articles-per-week from the Centauri Dreams new forum. These numbers include the continuing progress of “Project Icarus” (design study for a fusion-based interstellar probe) and a few other ongoing projects.
By itself, Tau Zero does not answer all the challenges sought by the 100-yr starship organization. It is still missing a concerted revenue generation scheme, does not have all of the needed topic pioneers, and has no plans to actually launch missions. The presumption is that much research remains before mission implementation is ready to be addressed.
In this short submission, these methods can not be explained in detail, but several details have been published. For this first solicitation from the 100-year starship organization, it is hoped that introducing these issues and methods, along with this bibliography, will provide valuable guidance.
British Interplanetary Society, (continuous), (http://www.bis-space.com/)
Gilster, Paul. (continuous) Centauri Dreams – The news forum of the Tau Zero Foundation, (https://centauri-dreams.org/)
Klien, Eric. (continuous), Lifeboat Foundation, (http://lifeboat.com/ex/main)
Long, Kelvin. (continuous), Project Icarus, (http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/)
Millis, M. G. (2010), First Interstellar Missions, Considering Energy and Incessant Obsolescence. JBIS, 63, (publication pending)
Millis, M. G. (2010), Status Report on the Tau Zero Foundation. Centauri Dreams, 2010/Nov/19. (https://centauri-dreams.org?p=15379)
Millis, M. G. (2010), History Hints at a Decentralization of Future Space Activities, (IAC-10-E6.1.12). 61st IAC Prague, IAF.
Millis & Davis (eds). (2009), Frontiers of Propulsion Science. Vol 227 of Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). [See in particular Ch. 2 about technology limits, and Ch. 22 about organizational methods]
Pacher, Tibor. (continuous) Peregrinus Interstellar, (http://www.peregrinus- interstellar.net/)
(c) Marc G Millis
