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.
Hi Paul, I have high hopes for the 100YSS Symposium. I have signed up for two workshops. The symposium last year was fascinating and inspiring. I hope this years event results in some kind of fairly specific road map for the 100YSS and ideally some kind for how framework the various interstellar organization can work together.
Paul, thanks for maintaining this blogs it is my primary source on all things interstellar. Have you considered a centauri-dreams meet up at 100YSS?
railmeat, I haven’t set up anything specific for 100YSS, but I should be all over the place. Please come introduce yourself — always glad to meet Centauri Dreams readers!
Former US President Bill Clinton Backs Interstellar Voyage Project
Former president Bill Clinton has lent his support to the 100-Year Starship initiative, a project started by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA ) to research interstellar travel.
While humanity has sent spacecraft throughout the solar system, traveling to another star is a whole different ballgame. The distances involved are significantly greater, and so are the attendant technological challenges.
“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,” President Clinton said in a statement.
The issues associated with interstellar travel will be discussed at the upcoming 100-Year Starship Public Symposium, an event open to scientists and interested members of the public, from Sept. 13 through Sept. 16 in Houston.
“The 100YSS 2012 Public Symposium will bring together influential thought, scientific and cultural leaders to explore the technologies, science, social structures and strategies needed to make capabilities for human travel to another star system a reality within the next century,” officials said in a statement.
Interstellar travel will be necessary if humanity ever hopes to visit another habitable world. More than 800 planets have been discovered beyond our solar system, with some of them potentially hospitable to life.
Speakers at the public event will include symposium chair Mae Jemison, the first female African American astronaut, as well as Star Trek actor LeVar Burton, astronomer Jill Tarter, a co-founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, and other notable thinkers.
Jemison also leads the 100-Year Starship organization, an independent, non-governmental organization that was founded this year using seed money from DARPA.
Visit SPACE.com next week for complete coverage of the 100YSS Public Symposium
To my mind, Workshop 2 looks like it’ll be the key one. Pity there’s no chance I can get out to Houston to attend. It would be interesting to hear the arguments in favour of trying to run before we can crawl!
Stephen
Oxford, UK, for the foreseeable future.
Will someone be taking youtube videos for those of us who can’t attend?
The 100 Year Starship Symposium sounds like it will be a very interesting event- too bad there is no chance I can get out to Houston to attend. All the workshops are interesting, but in particular the questions to be discussed at Workshop 2 are probably the most important. Do we build up to interstellar travel in a series of baby steps, possibly even colonizing the entire solar system before we launch an interstellar flight, or do we instead jump right to the task of building a starship?
I think that colonizing the solar system is most likely not a prerequisite for building a starship, and that such a voyage is likely to be a revolutionary leap rather than a slow stepping-stone like process. Interstellar flight is just a much bigger challenge than interplanetary flight, and will take entirely different propulsion technology, far more robust life support, and possibly even an unexpected physics breakthrough. Developing interplanetary rocket ships won’t, ultimately, bring you to building starships. Perhaps interplanetary exploration and colonization will be managed by one, somewhat more short-term agency or group of companies while another organization focuses on interstellar flight.
James writes:
I’ve been told that last year in Orlando all the talks were videotaped, but I don’t know what became of the video. I haven’t seen any of the talks online, and I don’t know what plans are for this year. My own view is that every conference should have full video capabilities and an online archive.
If they could make a yearly DVD for the conference that would be handy, I’d be happy to purchase it. Not everyone even in the states can attend let alone those who live overseas.
Cheers, Paul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/science/space/18starship.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
Not Such a Stretch to Reach for the Stars
Adrian Mann
An Icarus Interstellar design for an unmanned probe uses decades of technological advances to build on a 1970s British project called Daedalus.
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 17, 2011
ORLANDO, Fla. — A starship without an engine?
Department of Energy and National Aeronautics & Space
AMBITIONS A 1967 test of a nuclear engine. NASA has revived such work.
It may seem a fantastical notion, but hardly more so than the idea of building a starship of any kind, especially with NASA’s future uncertain at best.
Yet here in Orlando, not far from the launching site of the space program’s most triumphant achievements, the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, drew hundreds this month to a symposium on the 100-Year Starship Study, which is devoted to ideas for visiting the stars.
Participants — an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers — explored a mix of ideas, including how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip. (Alternatively, machines could build humans at the destination, perhaps tweaked to live in non-Earth-like environs.)
“The space program, any space program, needs a dream,” said one participant, Joseph Breeden. “If there are no dreamers, we’ll never get anywhere.”
It was Dr. Breeden who offered the idea of an engineless starship.
A physicist by training, he had most recently devised equations that forecast to banks how much they were going to lose on their consumer loans.
From his doctoral thesis, Dr. Breeden remembered that in a chaotic gravitational dance, stars are sometimes ejected at high speeds. The same effect, he believes, could propel starships.
First, find an asteroid in an elliptical orbit that passes close to the Sun. Second, put a starship in orbit around the asteroid. If the asteroid could be captured into a new orbit that clings close to the Sun, the starship would be flung on an interstellar trajectory, perhaps up to a tenth of the speed of light.
“The chaotic dynamics of those two allow all the energy of one to be transferred to the other,” said Dr. Breeden, who came toting copies of a paper describing the technique. “It’s a unique type of gravity assist.”
Darpa, by design, pursues out-of-the-box projects without immediate military use. (In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the agency laid the groundwork for the Internet.)
David L. Neyland, the director of tactical technology at Darpa, who orchestrated the one-year starship study, noted that his agency was founded more than 50 years ago as a response to Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s cold war satellite coup.
And the research and development of technologies that could lead to a starship, he said, would likely create useful military spinoffs.
“At every step along the way in the space business, the Department of Defense has benefited,” Mr. Neyland said.
In the talks, speakers laid out challenges that, while herculean, did not seem out of the realm of the possible, even without resorting to exotic physics like “Star Trek” warp drives.
Still, the sheer distances are daunting. “The problem of the stars is larger than most people realize,” said James Benford, a physicist who organized sessions on starship propulsion.
Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, an organization of volunteers that has already spent several years on starship designing, gave an analogy. If Earth were in Orlando and the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, were in Los Angeles, then NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft, the most distant manmade objects, have traveled just one mile.
Another way of looking at the challenge is that in 10,000 years, the speed of humans has jumped by a factor of about 10,000, from a stroll (2.6 m.p.h.) to the Apollo astronauts’ return from the Moon (26,000 m.p.h.). Reaching the nearest stars in reasonable time — decades, not centuries — would require a velocity jump of another factor of 10,000.
The first steps, however, are easy to imagine. Even in the 1950s, rocket scientists realized that the current engines — burning kerosene or hydrogen and spewing flames out the nozzle — are the rocket equivalent of gas guzzlers. They designed nuclear engines that use reactors to heat liquid hydrogen into a fast-moving stream of gas. NASA had such engines ready for a hypothetical manned mission to Mars to follow the Moon landings.
Today, the space agency has revived that work, beginning with studies on an ideal fuel for a space reactor, and new nuclear engines could be ready by the end of the decade.
As for radioactivity concerns, the reactors would not be started until they reached space. “Space is a wonderful place to use nuclear power, because it is already radioactive,” said Geoffrey Landis, a scientist at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio (and a science fiction author).
More advanced nuclear engines could use reactors to generate electric fields that accelerated charged ions for the thrust. Then fusion engines — producing energy through the combining of hydrogen atoms — could finally be powerful enough for interstellar travel.
The British Interplanetary Society put together a concept for a fusion-powered starship in the 1970s called Daedalus, extrapolating from known physics and technology. Dr. Obousy’s group, Icarus Interstellar, is revisiting the Daedalus design to see if 30-some years of new technology can produce a better starship.
Daedalus dwarfs the Saturn 5, the rocket that took astronauts to the Moon. “However, it’s no bigger than a Nimitz aircraft carrier,” Dr. Obousy said. “We have the ability to create big things. We just don’t have the ability to launch big things.”
Dr. Benford advocated another approach, harking back to the era of sailing ships. Giant sails on the starship could billow from photons beamed from Earth by lasers or giant antennae. “Here’s a case where we know the physics, and the engineering seems doable,” he said.
By contrast, no one has yet built an energy-producing fusion reactor.
Some of the questions posed at the symposium seemed almost mundane: What kind of lights should a starship have? How do you pack enough spare parts for a 50-year trip when there’s no Home Depot along the way? Other talks ruminated on theological and philosophical questions. “Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too?” was the title of one.
“Vision without execution is daydreaming,” Mr. Neyland said in his introductory remarks, paraphrasing a Japanese proverb.
“And what we’re trying to inspire with the 100-Year Starship Study is that first step in establishing a bar that’s high enough, with challenges that are hard enough that people will actually go start tackling some of these really hard problems.”
For Dr. Breeden, discussions with other attendees affirmed his underlying idea and calculations, but it seems unlikely that asteroid flinging would be sufficient by itself. Still, it could prove a useful and cost-effective supplement for other propulsions systems.
The $1.1 million study — $1 million from Darpa, $100,000 from NASA — will culminate with the awarding of a $500,000 grant to an organization that will take the torch for further work.
Darpa would then exit the starship business, sidestepping interrogation by Congress during the next budget hearings of why it was spending taxpayer money on science fiction dreams.
“They want to get people thinking about a topic and propagate it very subtly,” said Gregory Benford, a physics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is also a science fiction author (and the twin brother of James Benford). “They want it out of the budget by early next year.”
Perhaps tellingly, no high-level NASA officials spoke at the symposium other than Pete Worden, director of the Ames Research Center in California, whom Mr. Neyland described as a “co-conspirator” and who is often regarded as a maverick in the space agency.
“If we’re lucky, it will change NASA,” the science-fiction-writing Dr. Benford said of the starship research.
Some speakers said they thought the first goal over the next century should be colonizing the solar system, starting with Mars.
Dr. Obousy, for one, made his preference known in a couplet:
On to the stars!
Cowards shoot for Mars.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 18, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Not Such a Stretch to Reach for the Stars.
The last 100-Year Starship Study symposium causes a Senator to complain about a waste of government money.
“You might be surprised that as part of the Defense Department’s mission to protect Americans, your tax dollars funded a workshop about aliens from “Star Trek” entitled: Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too? It’s just one questionable projects under the microscope of fiscal conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who’s taking his red pen to cuts that he sees as no-brainers.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57508980/sequestration-could-be-pentagon-pork-killer/
Paul Titze said on September 9, 2012 at 1:26:
“If they could make a yearly DVD for the conference that would be handy, I’d be happy to purchase it. Not everyone even in the states can attend let alone those who live overseas. Cheers, Paul.”
How about publication of the proceedings as well? I think have transcripts or similar documentation on the lectures is equally as important. I know that it was impossible for everyone to attend every talk, so I think even symposium attendees will find them of value.
If whoever is handling the distribution waits too long, not only will they lose the momentum of the symposiums but then they will pile up and could be overwhelming and/or too expensive to keep up.
I was under the impression that the winner of the DARPA solicitation would be given those materials from the first workshop to use as they see fit… including the option of selling them. That is all I know. I have seen nothing yet from Mae Jemsion about that topic. We shall see.
Alan Penny said on September 10, 2012 at 7:00:
The last 100-Year Starship Study symposium causes a Senator to complain about a waste of government money.
“You might be surprised that as part of the Defense Department’s mission to protect Americans, your tax dollars funded a workshop about aliens from “Star Trek” entitled: Did Jesus Die for Klingons, Too? It’s just one questionable projects under the microscope of fiscal conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who’s taking his red pen to cuts that he sees as no-brainers.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57508980/sequestration-could-be-pentagon-pork-killer/
LJK replies:
Oh, where would our American democracy be if some ignorant politician did not rail about wasteful spending when it comes to anything related to space (much better off is the correct answer).
We can thank scientific geniuses like Tom Coburn’s colleagues such as Senator Richard Bryan for shutting down NASA’s SETI program in 1993 less than one year after it had begun – in the process assuring that NASA has pretty much shied away from the field ever since, excluding astrobiology (tiny alien microbes are always a relatively safer topic). Brown accused NASA of wasting taxpayer’s money looking for “little green men.” If that level of ignorance doesn’t set your teeth on edge….
And of course there was the late and not-so-great Senator William Proxmire, who did his darndest over a decade earlier than Bryan to initially keep NASA from doing SETI using similar ideology and rhetoric to ridicule the search for perhaps the greatest question in human history. It took a preemptive strike by Carl Sagan to keep Proxmire’s budget axe from coming down on SETI’s neck, though I am not quite certain where he was when Bryan later succeeded in darkening our collective intellects.
Stephen J. Garber of the NASA History Office wrote a paper on this intellectual tragedy, which was published in the JBIS in 1999 and is online here:
http://history.nasa.gov/garber.pdf
Getting back to Coburn et al, I feel truly sorry in one way for the poor guy who came up with that title for his talk. No doubt he just wanted to make his lecture sound interesting and stand out from the crowd at the symposium.
Apparently he did not count on the words Jesus and Klingons in the same line stirring up the ire of the religious and fiscally sensitive in this land (or did he….).
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2012/09/sen-coburn-does.html
Around 1998 I gave a lecture at the Boston NSS which I titled “Eight Easy Steps to Conquer the Cosmos”. I did it as a combination of whimsy, a desire for a catchy title, and a bit of a poke at a book titled The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, written by Marshall T. Savage and first published in 1992. Among other things, Savage assumed there were no other beings in the entire galaxy, so the Milky Way and its 400 billion star systems were open for colonization by humanity – in eight easy steps, no less.
Anyway… I soon learned that some radical group (I think a local branch of the bunch that thought Cassini’s RTGs would explode and wipe out every living thing on Earth) found out about my lecture and its title and actually considered protesting it! I was deeply flattered at such potential attention, not to mention the fact that the Boston NSS was in dire need of fresh membership.
Sadly, not one person protested my talk and civilization carried on, just as our galaxy remains unconquered by the Terran Empire to this day.
So let us not dump on Senator Coburn for his knee-jerk reaction to a single lecture from the symposium; rather we should thank him for the extra publicity which his rant will generate, especially in quarters that might otherwise remain equally ignorant of our starship efforts. As anyone in Hollywood will tell you, there is no such thing as bad publicity, just publicity.
I have a a few questions:
1. Has anyone found out if the symposium is being filmed and released in some form to the Public?
2. Is there a Planned area in space to travel to? And if not how is that decision being made?
3. How long would it take to get to where we want to go? And if it took a life time to get there, would we send humans and how would we do that?