Isn't it fascinating how the Voyager spacecraft keep sparking the public imagination? When Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989, the encounter was almost elegaic. It was as if we were saying goodbye to the doughty mission that had done so much to acquaint us with the outer Solar System, and although there was talk of continuing observations, the public perception was that Voyager was now a part of history. Which it is, of course, but the two spacecraft keep bobbing up in the news, reminding us incessantly about the dimensions of the Solar System, its composition, its relationship to the challenging depths of interstellar space the Voyagers now enter. In the public eye, Voyager has acquired a certain patina of myth, a fact once noted by NASA historian Roger Launius and followed up by author Stephen Pyne in his book Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery: ...the Voyager mission tapped into a heritage of exploration -- that was its cultural power. But there was...

by Kelvin Long Physicist and aerospace engineer Kelvin Long is the co-founder of Project Icarus, the interstellar design study that is a successor to Project Daedalus. Here he gives us a look at the history of the British Interplanetary Society, whose accomplishments and continuing efforts in the area of interstellar propulsion have energized the entire field. As well as being an active Tau Zero practitioner, Long is a fellow of the BIS and a member of the recently reconstituted BIS Technical Committee, and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. More about the history of the BIS can be read in the BIS publication 'Interplanetary' written by the current President Bob Parkinson, which is now available from the society's Web site. The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) is a name synonymous with interstellar travel throughout its history. First formed by Philip E. Cleator in Liverpool in 1933, the organization's headquarters were subsequently moved...

Students interested in getting involved in space research should be aware of NASA's Space Technology Research Fellowships. The agency is currently seeking applications from graduate students at accredited US universities for the fellowships, with a deadline for submitting fellowship proposals of 23 February. The fellowships, which are sponsored by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, are available to US graduate student researchers who show 'significant potential to contribute to NASA's strategic space technology objectives through their studies.' NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun describes the program: "Our Space Technology Graduate Fellowships will help create the pool of highly skilled workers needed for NASA's and our nation's technological future, motivating many of the country's best young minds into educational programs and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This fellowship program is coupled to a larger, national research and development effort...

by Marc Millis On January 11 & 12, I participated in a gathering of roughly 30 individuals to learn about and discuss the DARPA/Ames 100-year Starship Study. In addition to reporting on those events, I've included my personal commentary at the end of this report. Recall that in October 2010, the Director of NASA/Ames, Pete Worden, inadvertently revealed that DARPA was funding Ames to the tune of $1M for such a study. This triggered something of a media flurry and shortly thereafter DARPA issued this press release. This January meeting was the first step in their process to involve the insights of others. I requested and was granted an invitation. The gathering was held in a 1903 fort that had been converted a couple of years ago into a modern lodge and meeting area (Fort Baker, now Cavallo Point). Its location near the base of the Golden Gate Bridge provided a calm, out-of-the-way location with few distractions. The meeting began at noon on the first day, carried on (with breaks)...

I remember thinking when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 that it would be a test case for how long a spacecraft would last. The subject was on my mind because I had been thinking about interstellar probes, and the problem of keeping electronics alive for a century or more even if we did surmount the propulsion problem. The Voyagers weren't built to test such things, of course, but it's been fascinating to watch as they just keep racking up the kilometers. As of this morning, Voyager 1 is 17,422,420,736 kilometers from the Earth (16 hours, 8 minutes light time). Then you start looking at system performance and have to shake your head. As the spacecraft continue their push into interstellar space, only a single instrument on Voyager 1 has broken down. Nine other instruments have been powered down on both craft to save critical power resources, but as this article in the Baltimore Sun pointed out recently, each Voyager has five still-funded experiments and seven that are still...

It’s an interactive morning here in the eastern US, one in which partial solar eclipses can be viewed from more or less anywhere on the planet, asteroids can be chased by school children using data from automatic telescopes in Hawaii, and exoplanet discoveries can be made by gas workers in South Yorkshire. Let’s start with the eclipse, as seen in the image at left that was fed into the Twitterstream by space journalist extraordinaire Daniel Fischer. The accompanying tweet tells us that Fischer was in Aachen with a German TV crew when the photo was made. Those with unlimited cash can chase eclipses physically, and there is a certain romance in the act, but the real world is made up mostly of those of us who can’t be in the right place at the right time, which is why webcasts from Barcelona to Lahore were worth watching as they covered the event, or tried to. This eclipse was visible to those in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia whose local skies cleared in time to make it...

If you charted the appearance of certain stars in books through the last two centuries, which ones would get the most hits? It's an interesting question that Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) ponders on his systemic site, using Google's Ngram viewer as his tool. Ngram lets you plug in the terms of your choice and chart their appearance, using the vast collection scanned into Google Books. When Laughlin plugged in Alpha Centauri, it seemed a safe term to use. The closest star(s) to our own are always going to get a fair amount of attention. He added Proxima Centauri, Beta Pictoris, 51 Pegasi and 61 Cygni. The chart (shown below) is a bit startling when you realize that the blue spike at its left represents not Alpha Centauri but 61 Cygni, but everything becomes clear when you add in the fact that 61 Cygni was the first star other than the Sun to have its distance measured, making it a major player in 19th Century astronomical references. Greg also reminds us of the Scottish polymath...

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...

Long before I knew what ideas for interstellar flight were out there in the literature, I always saw the idea of a trip between the stars in Homeric terms. It would be an epic journey that, like that of Odysseus, would resonate throughout human history and become the stuff of legend, even myth. In back of all that was the belief that any vehicle we could design that could carry people and not just instruments to the stars would be a 'generation ship,' in which the crew were born, raised their families, lived their lives and died while the ship, moving at maybe 1 percent of light speed, pressed on to destination. That familiar science fiction trope still has a ring of truth about it, because if for some reason we as a species decided we absolutely had to get a few human beings to Alpha Centauri, about the only option we would have for the near-term is a solar sail and a close-pass gravity assist by the Sun, and even in the best case scenario, that still works out to around a thousand...

Is NASA going to start pushing back into the realm of truly innovative ideas? Maybe so, to judge from what Robert Braun continues to say. Braun, who joined the agency in February, is now NASA chief technologist, a recently revived office that coordinates mission-specific technologies at the ten NASA centers. This story in IEEE Spectrum notes that Braun is soliciting 'disruptive technologies' through a series of 'grand challenges.' Most of these relate to short-term space activities such as Earth observation missions, but enhancing robotics and pushing new ideas in space propulsion has obvious implications for deep space operations. From Susan Karlin's story at the IEEE Spectrum site: The grand challenges address three areas: accessing space more routinely, managing space as a natural resource, and future quests. Achieving these goals mostly boils down to improvements in spacecraft propulsion, energy use, and safety; advances in astronaut health, communication technology, and...

It's fascinating to watch the development of online preprint services from curiosity (which is what the arXiv site was when Paul Ginsparg developed it in 1991) to today's e-print options, hosted at Cornell and with mirrors not just at the original Los Alamos National Laboratory site but all around the world. Then, too, the arXiv is changing in character, becoming an early forum for discussion and debate, as witness Ian Crawford's comments on Jean Schneider's Astrobiology paper. We looked at Crawford's criticisms of Schneider yesterday. Today we examine Schneider's response, likewise a preprint, and published online in a fast-paced digital dialogue. Schneider (Paris Observatory) focuses here on nuclear fusion and antimatter by way of making the case that interstellar flight will be a long and incredibly difficult undertaking. A bit of context: Schneider's real point in the original Astrobiology piece wasn't to offer a critique of interstellar flight ideas, but to call attention to the...

I want to run through the particulars on the upcoming 2010 Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop at the University of Colorado in a moment, as the deadline for abstracts is still three weeks away for those who are thinking of submitting papers. But looking through the presentations at conferences like this one -- it's sponsored by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the US Air Force Research Laboratory and Glenn Research Center's In-Space Propulsion Technology Project -- I always think about where we stand in terms of long-term goals. And something Caleb Scharf said in a recent post on Life, Unbounded resonated in those terms. Scharf (Columbia University) had been discussing the list of Mars launches, going all the way back to 1960 with the failed Soviet Marsnik 1, subsequent Sputnik 22, Zond and Cosmos launches, various Mariner attempts, and, of course, the eventual Viking Landers. It's a list of failures interspersed with triumphs like the current rovers and orbital vehicles like Mars...

by Larry Klaes Larry Klaes wraps up his two-part essay on our attitudes towards extraterrestrials by looking at how the subject has been treated in the past, and speculating on the scenarios that might bring disaster. Do Earth-shattering depictions of space invasion reflect what people really believe, or are they merely a form of escapism? Either way, they tell us something about ourselves as we confront the possibility of contact. For those who may still wonder and question just how much weight the words of the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking hold for the concept of alien intelligences and their potential reactions to encountering humanity, consider this: A new science fiction film coming out this November titled Skyline has recently premiered its theatrical trailer, which you can view here. The trailer begins with the line: "On August 28th, 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible... in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life." Now it is true...

By Larry Klaes Just how we would react to the reception of a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization is an increasingly controversial question, and one filled with import as we take the SETI search in proposed new directions. The ongoing Royal Society meeting in Chicheley (UK) probes the issue, with panel discussions on whether or not we should be sending our own broadcasts to the stars, and presentations exploring the import of extraterrestrial life on the future of humanity. It seems a good time, then, for Larry Klaes to have a look at the question in this, the first of a two-part essay that analyzes our attitudes not so much about signals from the stars as their senders. Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking's...