NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts announced twelve awards for Phase I studies in late September. Phase I typically means six-month studies funded to the tune of $75,000, aimed at validating new concepts and identifying the technologies that must be mastered to make them a reality. The most promising Phase I studies can go on to more robust Phase II funding of $400,000 in a two-year study window.
You can see the complete list of Phase I awards on this Goddard Space Flight Center page. Among the most interesting for interstellar theorists are, in addition to Webster Cash’s New Worlds Imager (discussed here yesterday), the following:
and in particular,
NIAC was established in 1998 with a clear mission: find revolutionary concepts from people and organizations not working within the NASA umbrella. “We’re looking for grand ideas for architectures and systems, ideas that are more than just one piece of technology,” NIAC director Robert Cassanova told me. “The result of a study, for instance, might be a roadmap to develop a new set of enabling technologies. In other words, the concept doesn’t have to have all the enabling technologies available to it now. The output of our studies would be a roadmap to develop the technology to make it work.”
NIAC’s funded studies are all available at its Web site, where serious students of interstellar issues will find plenty to keep them occupied. A good place to begin would be Ralph McNutt’s papers on “A Realistic Interstellar Explorer.” McNutt, working at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, has designed a spacecraft with implications not only for near-term interstellar technology, but for our view of long-term missions and how we will conduct them. I’ll have more to say about the Realistic Interstellar Explorer soon.
