Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson responded to yesterday's post about Neil Armstrong with reminiscences of the Apollo program, but because the first of these ran as a comment to the story, I was afraid a lot of readers wouldn't see it -- we have far more subscribers through RSS than any other medium, and many of them do not see the comments. When Al submitted a second comment, I decided to merge them into a single post here. The author of numerous scientific papers and a widely known figure in the interstellar community, Al saw the Apollo program up close as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator. Here he talks about Armstrong and Aldrin and the antics of the crew that followed Apollo 11. by A. A. Jackson I spent almost 4 years in the presence of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I came to the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in 1966, where I was placed as a crew training instructor. I had degrees in math and physics at that time. Seems engineers were pressed into real...

"Neil Armstrong may well be the only human being of our time to be remembered 50,000 years from now." -- J. G. Ballard, "Back to the Heady Future," Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1993. If anything, Neil Armstrong was almost too perfect for the role he played. If I had been asked to script the kind of character I'd like to have seen as the first man on the Moon, Armstrong would have walked into the role effortlessly, a quiet, even diffident man who had the courage to ride rockets. Flyers come in all descriptions, but those I used to hang around with in my own flying days (far tamer than any of Armstrong's, to be sure!) were generally raconteurs, full of improbable tales that could never be verified, jongleurs seasoned in the arts of extroversion. Not so Neil Armstrong, and therein lies the reason for my own sense of pride in the man and his accomplishment. July 20, 1969 was, inevitably, a hot day in St. Louis. I had driven to Webster Groves that afternoon to watch the moon landing with my...

"The future never just happened, it was created." The quote is from Will and Ariel Durant, the husband and wife team who collaborated on an eleven-volume history of civilization that always used to be included in Book of the Month deals, which is how many of us got our copies. I'm glad to see the Durants' quotation brought into play by the 100 Year Starship organization in the service of energizing space exploration. It's a call to create, to work, to push our ideas. 100 Year Starship (100YSS) puts the Durants' thinking into practice at the second 100 Year Starship Public Symposium, September 13-16 at the Hyatt Regency in Houston. The event promises academic presentations, science fiction panels, workshops, classes and networking possibilities for those in the aerospace community and the public at large. My hope is that the gathering will kindle some of the same enthusiasm we saw last October in Orlando, when the grant from DARPA that created the 100 Year Starship had yet to be...

Centauri Dreams readers will remember Adam Frank's recent op-ed Alone in the Void in the New York Times arguing that given the difficulty involved in traveling to the stars, humans had better get used to living on and improving this planet. 'We will have no other choice,' wrote Frank. 'There will be nowhere else to go for a very long time.' I responded to Frank's essay in Defending the Interstellar Vision, to which Frank replied on his NPR blog. Dr. Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and author of the highly regarded About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang (Free Press, 2011), a study of our changing conception of time that is now nearing the top of my reading stack. In his short NPR post, he makes a compelling point: Even if we could get a starship up to 10% of light speed (which would be an epoch-making achievement) then the round trip to the nearest known star with a planet would still take 300 years (it's Gliese 876d for all you...

After our recent exchange of ideas on SETI, Michael Chorost went out and read the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic, a book I had cited as an example of contact with extraterrestrials that turns out to be enigmatic and far beyond the human understanding. I've enjoyed the back and forth with Michael between Centauri Dreams and his World Wide Mind blog because I learn something new from him each time. In his latest post, Michael explains why incomprehensible technology isn't really his thing. A Sense of the Weird Why? Michael grants the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence may be far beyond our understanding. But in terms of science fiction and speculation in general, he favors what he calls 'the uncanny valley,' the sense of weirdness we get from a technology that is halfway between the incomprehensible and the known. A case in point is Piers Anthony's novel Macroscope, in which an alien message overwhelms the minds of those who can understand it (people with IQs in...

What I have in mind today is a book review, but I'll start with a bit of news. The word from Houston is that Ad Astra Rocket Co., which has been developing the VASIMR concept from its headquarters not far from Johnson Space Center in Texas, has been making progress with its 200-kw plasma rocket engine prototype. VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) offers constant power throttling (CPT), which would allow it to vary its exhaust for thrust and specific impulse while maintaining a constant power level. CPT has now been demonstrated in a June test, as was reported at the recent AIAA Joint Propulsion Conference in Atlanta and in trade publications like Aviation Week, a useful step forward for the program. VASIMR in Deep Space What to make of VASIMR's chances? When assessing something like this, I turn to my reference library, and because I've recently been reading Kelvin Long's Deep Space Propulsion, I wanted to see what he said about VASIMR. Long treats the subject in...

An interstellar movement has been brewing for the past sixty or so years among physicists and engineers who have taken a serious look at what it would take to get to the stars. Their work is not based on wishes but on physics, and while they are aware of the intractable distances to reach even the nearest star (4.2 years at the speed of light itself), they have continued to study how to send spacecraft on such epic journeys. Organizations have emerged -- DARPA's 100 Year Starship, Icarus Interstellar, the Tau Zero Foundation -- whose members call to mind physicist Robert Forward's injunction: "Travel to the stars is difficult but not impossible." Centauri Dreams readers know all this, but at least on the basis of Adam Frank's op-ed Alone in the Void, many readers of The New York Times do not. A professor of physics and astronomy himself (University of Rochester), Frank is well versed in the problems of distance and time and understands how difficult it will be to send humans to the...

Galileo Galilei makes a brief appearance in the news this morning with word that several copies of his books, including two examples of the Sidereus Nuncius, have turned out to be forgeries. The latter, whose title is usually translated as Starry Messenger, was the first scientific presentation on observations made with a telescope, and contains Galileo's early work on the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, among other things. One Marino Massimo De Caro, currently under arrest for massive thefts from the Girolamini Library in Naples, may have had connections with the forgeries, which are worrisome news for those of us who like to poke around in ancient manuscripts and for anyone interested in the history of science. News of the manuscripts also puts me in mind of a paper by Danielle Briot (Observatoire de Paris), which uses Galileo in quite a different context. Briot became interested in the life and work of Ary Sternfeld (1905-1980), a prolific writer on science and a researcher who may...

Paging back through Kelvin Long’s book Deep Space Propulsion (Springer, 2011) last night, I was reminded that Freeman Dyson had written about his disillusionment with nuclear pulse propulsion methods long after Project Orion was terminated. The passage is in his autobiographical account Disturbing the Universe (Basic, 1981), which caught Long’s attention and led him to reprint it. Here’s a snippet of Dyson’s reflections: Sometimes I am asked by friends who shared the joys and sorrows of Orion whether I would revise the project if by some miracle the necessary funds were suddenly to become available. The answer is an emphatic no... By its very nature, the Orion ship is a filthy creature and leaves its radioactive mess behind it wherever it goes... Many things that were acceptable in 1958 are no longer acceptable today. My own standards have changed, too. History has passed Orion by. There will be no going back. Long speculates that Dyson may simply have been referring to Orion as an...

It had never occurred to me that there was something the Graf Zeppelin and the Saturn V had in common. Nonetheless, a re-reading of Freeman Dyson's paper "Interstellar Transport" confirms the obvious connection: Like the great airships of the 1930s, the Saturn V was huge and carried a payload that was absurdly small. Dyson, writing in 1968 fresh off the end of Project Orion, the rise of Apollo, and the triumph of chemical propulsion, had thought at one time that the US could bypass the Saturn V and its ilk, offering a fast track to the planets at a fraction of Apollo's cost. The Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was a major factor in putting an end to that speculation. I mentioned yesterday that I thought Dyson set about to be deliberately provocative in this piece, that he hoped to reach people who would have been unaware that interstellar distances could conceivably be crossed (thus his choice of Physics Today as his venue). To do that, he had to show that even reaching the Moon...

My time off last week really was refreshing, although it coincided with the same heat wave that has kept the Eastern US under duress for many days now, especially dangerous for those who lost power because of severe storms. Fortunately, I used part of my time to fly to San Jose to participate in Steve Durst's Galaxy Forum (sponsored by the International Lunar Observatory Association), where I spoke on destinations in the outer Solar System and beyond as we make our first tentative steps into the galaxy. It was a good gathering, with lively talk from Seth Shostak, Jon Lomberg, Tony Cardoza (who signs people up to travel on future flights with Virgin Galactic), and Durst himself. It was also a pleasure to meet Centauri Dreams regular Alex Tolley. Blissfully, the temperatures never got out of the low 70s, with a refreshing breeze that made walking around downtown a pleasure. Miles, my older son, lives near San Francisco and the trip was also a wonderful chance to reconnect. I can recall...

Summer in Green Town, Illinois back in 1928 opened like this: "It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer." Thus the beginning of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, which I re-read not long after the author's death. With catastrophic fires in the American west and triple-digit heat along the Atlantic seaboard, summer has indeed come, and so has a brief summer holiday for Centauri Dreams. Although I won't have months ahead of me the way Bradbury's character Douglas Spaulding did, I am looking forward to a week off. This site is now approaching its eighth anniversary and I'm ready for a break, one that will give me time to catch up on reading, do necessary work around the house, and...

We all carry our assumptions with us no matter where we go, dubious extra baggage that can confuse not just our scientific views but our lives in general. That's why it's so refreshing when those assumptions are challenged in an insightful way. Think, for example, of the starship as envisioned by Hollywood. In our times it looks like something produced by the joint efforts of NASA, ESA and other governmental space agencies. No matter how diverse the crew, the model is always based on western culture, the assumptions reflecting our modern ethos. When an assumption is ripe for questioning, along comes a writer like Michael Bishop. Consider the starship Kalachakra, carrying a crew of 990 to a planet in the Gliese 581 system, as envisioned in Bishop's 'Twenty Lights to the Land of Snow,' a novella in the Johnson/McDevitt book Going Interstellar. Most of the crew spends the flight in hibernation using the wonderfully named drug ursidormizine -- thus slumbering 'bear-like' -- but each...

Tau Zero founder Marc Millis is interviewed by Bruce Dorminey in Forbes this week, the logical first question being where interstellar flight ranks on our list of priorities. A case can be made, after all, that we have yet to get humans beyond the Moon, and that while we have managed robotic missions to the outer planets, our technologies need development closer to home. Should a Moon base get our attention, or a Mars mission? Millis argues that pursuing next steps like these should be managed in tandem with the pursuit of more far-reaching advances that force us to look beyond existing methods. Breakthroughs can change everything, and Millis is, after all, the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, which came to an abrupt end in 2002 when a congressional earmark to build a propulsion laboratory in Alabama -- one that cost more than all NASA's BPP research put together -- scarfed up what could have been research money. And as Millis tells Dorminey, we're left...

Thinking of Ray Bradbury, as I suppose most of us were yesterday after learning of his death, I found my reminiscences of his work mixing with what was to have been today's topic, solar sails and their beamed sail counterparts. I've read almost all of Bradbury's work up through the 1960s and admittedly little after that, but he's a writer I return to often to try to recapture the early magic. I was going through his stories trying to think of one involving solar sails and I came up blank, but in a moment of pure serendipity, I realized that a book I mentioned yesterday held a little Bradbury gem that was all about sails and their implications for the human imagination. The book is Arthur C. Clarke's collection Project Solar Sail (Roc, 1990), which contains a poem Bradbury wrote with Jonathan V. Post called "To Sail Beyond the Sun: A Luminous Collage." Like so much of Bradbury's work, it uses language like witchcraft to pull you into the experience, and like so much of the later...

Today was to have been devoted to antimatter, continuing the discussion not only of how to produce the stuff on Earth or harvest it in nearby space, but how to create the kind of propulsion system that could tap its enormous energies. But the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence released its first public announcement about the 100 Year Starship yesterday, and I want to go right to that story given the interest that grew out of last year's starship symposium in Orlando. I'll get back to antimatter, then, and particularly the provocative work of Ronan Keane and Wei-Ming Zhang on magnetic nozzles for propulsion systems, on Monday. For today, though, let's talk about pushing out into the galaxy. The Tau Zero Foundation has a particular interest in the 100 Year Starship organization because our friends at Icarus Interstellar, who are re-thinking the 1970s Project Daedalus design, were partners in the winning proposal, which was called "An Inclusive, Audacious Journey Transforms Life...

I've been thinking all weekend about Dandridge Cole, the aerospace engineer and futurist whose death at age 44 deprived interstellar studies of one of its most insightful advocates. Cole died in 1965, just five years before a deadline he himself set (in 1953!) for a manned landing on the Moon. But then, the former paratrooper from Ohio thought a lot about the future and the need for a kind of 'future studies' that would look at current technological trends and project going forward just as conventional historical studies reconstruct what happened to us in centuries past. The heart attack that struck Cole down in his office at General Electric's Space Technology Center in Valley Forge, PA deprived us of much, but we do have the substantial legacy of a number of articles and monographs, along with three books, among which Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids, written with Donald Cox (Chilton Books, 1964) may stand out as the most influential. Andreas Hein, who is heading...

Our expectations determine so much of what we see, which is one of the great lessons of Michael Michaud's sweeping study of our attitudes toward extraterrestrial intelligence in Contact with Alien Civilizations (Springer, 2006). But extraterrestrials aside, I've also been musing over how our attitudes affect our perceptions in relation to something closer to home, the human space program. Recently I was reminded of Richard Gott's views on the space program and the Copernican Principle, which suggest that just as our location in the universe is not likely to be special, neither is our location in time. My expectation, for example, is that whether it takes one or many centuries, we will eventually have expanded far enough into the Solar System to make the technological transition to interstellar missions. But Gott (Princeton University) has been arguing since 2007 that there is simply no assurance of continued growth. In fact, his work indicates we are as likely to be experiencing the...

By Michael Michaud The following post is a distinct change of pace for Centauri Dreams, a work of fiction that gets at questions at the heart of SETI. We've considered many ideas about interstellar probes that humans may one day launch toward nearby stars. But the reverse could occur: A more advanced technological civilization could send a probe in our direction, particularly after detecting signs of life or technology on a rapidly developing Earth. This idea is a challenge to the dominant scientific paradigm of contact -- our detection of radio signals from a remote society. The short story below presents one of many possible scenarios. In this case, the probe is an intelligent machine. It lacks the omniscience so often assumed in films and television programs; this form of intelligence, like ours, can misunderstand evidence and is capable of making mistakes. This story avoids the two stereotyped film and television versions of contact: being saved by altruistic aliens, or being...