The serious study of flight to the stars is a comparatively recent phenomenon. One of the early papers to take interstellar travel to a new level -- and to my knowledge the first technical article on manned interstellar missions -- was Leslie Shepherd's 'Interstellar Flight,' which appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1952. These days we all tinker with sociology and psychology, musing about what drives a society spaceward, but Shepherd, a British physicist and one of the godfathers of today's interstellar work, thought the reasons were obvious. We'll go to the stars out of scientific curiosity and the pure love of adventure. Thus the view from a somewhat more optimistic 1952, at least where space was concerned. It was an era when what seemed possible far outweighed the budgetary and political concerns that would silence efforts like Project Orion and, eventually, Apollo itself. But Shepherd, who at the time he wrote the paper was technical director for...

Although Jane Smiley has made the haunting story of the Viking settlement of Greenland widely known in her novel The Greenlanders (Knopf, 1988), we have few modern accounts that parallel what happened in remote places like Brattahlið and Garðar, where Erik the Red's settlements, which had lasted for 500 years, eventually fell victim to climate and lack of external supplies. But local extinctions and near-misses are important because, as John Hickman explains in his new book Reopening the Space Frontier (Technology and Society, 2010), they promote the kind of story-telling that Smiley is so skillful at, advancing the case that not just settlements but entire species can fail when conditions turn ugly. Image: A reproduction of a Norse church in Greenland, with Eriksfjord in the background. Credit: Hamish Laird/Wikimedia Commons. In this excerpt from the book, Hickman writes about three modern parallels to 15th Century Greenland, the first being the Sable Island mutiny, where...

Our recent discussion of Richard Gott and Robert Vanderbei's Sizing Up the Universe has me thinking about representing unfathomably huge scenarios in two-dimensional media, as Gott managed to do so brilliantly with his four-page gatefold map of the universe. How to manage such a feat, and the theory behind map-making of all kinds, can be found in the book, and all of it came to mind as I looked at Ashland Astronomy Studio's new Stars of the Northern Hemisphere poster. A full color sky map on a 36 x 24 glossy sheet, it's a handsome rendition of over 2400 stars. Centauri Dreams regular Erik Anderson is the creator, and he's been careful to add -- beyond the inset closeups of the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters, star names, asterisms and coordinate systems -- the location of exoplanet host stars. Exoplanet charting is indeed the new frontier, a depiction of new lands that calls to mind the painstaking efforts of seafaring expeditions that mapped the Pacific archipelagos and the coasts...

by Richard Obousy As project leader for Project Icarus, the ambitious successor to the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus starship design, Richard Obousy is deeply engaged with the advanced propulsion community. Here he gives us a report on the recent Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop, which he attended in November. It was a sizable gathering, but Richard focuses here on work of particular relevance to Project Icarus and the Tau Zero Foundation, the twin backers of Icarus. Recently, several members of the Project Icarus team attended the 2010 Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop (ASPW) at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. The event ran from from Monday, November 15 through Wednesday, November 17, with over sixty presentations given by a number of researchers. Project Icarus attendees included James French, Rob Adams, Robert Freeland, Andreas Tziolas and myself. The ASPW is focused on low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) concepts ranging from TRL 1 to 3. A...

Various accounts of what happened to Japan's Akatsuki Venus orbiter continue to come in, but it seems clear that the craft failed to achieve orbit. Sky & Telescope has been keeping a close eye on things and reports that errant thruster firings evidently caused an unexpected rotation that resulted in an on-board computer putting the vehicle into standby mode. The result: Too short a burn to ensure orbital capture, with Akatsuki now in a solar orbit that won't take it back to Venus for another seven years. Are course changes possible for another go then? We'll see. Supply, Demand and Near-Earth Space In an unaccustomed way, the Venus news has me in an inner system mode this morning, which means it's probably a good time to talk about Dana Andrews' thoughts on supply and demand when it comes to space colonization. Andrews (Andrews Space, Seattle) and colleagues Gordon Woodcock (Space America Inc.) and Brian Bloudek have been putting together a scenario for near-term commercialization of...