Several Centauri Dreams readers passed along Seth Shostak's latest article on SETI in IEEE Spectrum, a piece that invokes the 'Wow!' signal at Ohio State and goes on to make the case for continuing the hunt. Shostak thinks both the ongoing search for exoplanets and...
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Lasers: Protecting the Starship
Interesting new ideas about asteroid deflection are coming out of the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow), involving the use of lasers in coordinated satellite swarms to change an asteroid's trajectory. This is useful work in its own right, but I also want to mention...
Century of the Starship
I once thought about putting together a collection of classic papers on interstellar flight. It would start with early work by the likes of Les Shephard, Eugen Sänger and Carl Wiley (whose groundbreaking paper on solar sails appeared not in a scientific journal but in...
Starship Surfing: Ride the Bow Shock
We've been looking at slowing down a starship, pondering ways the interstellar medium itself might be of use, and seeing how the stellar wind produced by the destination star could slow a magsail. A large solar sail could use stellar photons, but the advantage of the...
Project Icarus: Contemplating Starship Design
Andreas Tziolas, current leader of Project Icarus, gave a lengthy interview recently to The Atlantic's Ross Andersen, who writes about starship design in Project Icarus: Laying the Plans for Interstellar Travel. Icarus encounters continuing controversy over its name,...
Millis: Of Time and the Starship
What next for the 100 Year Starship Study? NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will make the call, as Tau Zero founder Marc Millis told Alan Boyle in his recent interview. To talk to Boyle, Millis donned virtual garb and appeared in Second Life in...
Initial Thoughts on the Starship Symposium
I'm just back from the 100 Year Starship Symposium. The thoughts below were written yesterday evening (the 2nd), just after the event ended. It's a lovely evening here in Orlando, one I'm enjoying while sitting out in front of the Hilton waiting for my taxi. I got a...
If You’re Going to the Starship Conference…
Quite a few people involved with Tau Zero and many of the Project Icarus team are planning to be in Orlando at the end of the month for the 100 Year Starship Symposium. I know about most of these, but if you haven't already told me that you are planning to attend,...
The Times and the Starship
Why think seriously about mounting an effort to reach the stars? In yesterday's New York Times, Dennis Overbye runs through some of the basic drivers: The discovery of a habitable planet around a nearby star would create intense interest in sending a probe or,...
Starship Fuel from the Outer System
Adrian Mann has done it again, as witness his illustration of a gas mining operation on Uranus, reproduced below. The idea, as explored by Adam Crowl on Discovery News this morning, is to acquire vast amounts of helium-3 to supply not only Earth's energy needs but the...