NASA's Human Research Program is all about risk reduction, finding ways to counter fatigue and mitigate radiation damage, among other potential issues in space travel. But what if a different kind of program had evolved? After all, back in the 1960s the agency was looking into the much broader question of how a human being might be adapted for space. The notion grew out of a 1960 article by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline called "Cyborgs and Space," suggesting that re-creating the environment of Earth aboard a space vehicle was not as useful an option as adapting a human being at least partly to the conditions he or she would face. The idea was a bold one in its day. From the paper (the italics are in the original): The task of adapting man's body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past evolution brought about the altering...

by Tibor Pacher My friend Tibor Pacher quotes from Hermann Hesse on the front page of his PI Club site: "To let the possible happen, the impossible must be tried again and again." No one works harder at pushing the boundaries of the possible in terms of public outreach on interstellar topics than Tibor, whose efforts have ranged from the Faces from Earth project (championing messages from humanity on deep space missions) to the MiniSpaceWorld contest (soliciting ideas and designs for space-themed exhibits). In today's essay, Tibor looks back at a memorable evening in his youth, and ponders the sources of inspiration even as he gears up Faces from Earth for a new campaign based on the Voyager missions and the deeper meaning of their 'golden records.' I remember a wonderful starry night at Lake Balaton in Hungary, some forty years ago in my childhood. In those times street light was much more sparse in the evening than today, even in such holiday locations as Balaton. We watched an...

Terraforming is an extreme notion, modifying an entire planet to create a biosphere within which Earth-based live could thrive. But a recent BBC story (thanks to Erik Anderson for the tip) takes on a kind of terraforming that we've already accomplished on the South Atlantic island of Ascension. Up until now, I had always thought of Ascension in terms of the BBC transmitter there -- in my shortwave days, I always knew who had a relay station where and on what frequencies. But the vision I had was solely of high-tech antennae amidst volcanic debris. Now I learn Ascension has its green side. Image: British programmer and traveler Les Smith has made several trips to Ascension Island and has produced a wonderful photo log of his travels. This image shows the view looking down from Green Mountain. Further on in the story is a second image from Smith, this one of a garden showing how verdant some places on the island have become as a once barren landscape takes on new life. David Catling...

by Larry Klaes The Faces from Earth project, run so energetically by Tibor Pacher, is planning its next 'E.T. Are You Out There?' campaign, following a successful campaign in May that introduced interstellar concepts to school children in five countries. In this piece, journalist Larry Klaes looks back at the Voyager spacecraft, which will be the subject of the new Faces from Earth campaign. The Voyagers electrified all of us with the discovery of volcanoes on Io and a possible ocean beneath Europa's ice, and the ensuing stream of images from planets and moons never before seen up close. They also carried golden discs bearing information about their builders. As of this morning (EST), Voyager 1 is 15 hours, 44 minutes, 56 seconds in light-travel time from home, at the edge of the Solar System but, as Larry makes clear, hardly forgotten. In the first decade of the Space Age, humanity succeeded in sending a handful of robotic space probes to Earth's two nearest planetary neighbors,...

WISE Completes First Full Survey The WISE mission completed its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, generating more than a million images, of which one of the most beautiful is surely the image of the Pleiades cluster below. We're looking in the infrared at a mosaic of several hundred image frames with the combined light of WISE's four detectors working in a range of wavelengths. The cluster of stars in seen in a dense latticework of dust in an area covering seven square degrees, equivalent to about 35 full moons. Image: In this infrared view of the Pleiades from WISE, the cluster is seen surrounded by an immense cloud of dust. When this cloud was first observed, it was thought to be leftover material from the formation of the cluster. However, studies have found the cluster to be about 100 million years old -- any dust left over from its formation would have long dissipated by this time, from radiation and winds from the most massive stars. The cluster is therefore probably...

I once had an uncle who, in his eccentric way, taught me the glories of reading widely and across many disciplines. Every year he would visit us from Florida and each time he came, he was off on another tangent, usually a scientific pursuit of some kind, and now and then a venture into linguistics. One of his more memorable visits found him arriving with a set of slides he had made from books on Egyptian hieroglyphics, and we went through them one at a time as he explained what he had learned about Egyptian culture by mastering these symbols. Hieroglyphics Meet the Machine I think about that every time I ponder the fate of digital data, and this Reuters story, which mentions hieroglyphics, triggered the memory. For as Andreas Rauber (University of Technology of Vienna) points out, hieroglyphics -- or, for that matter, stone inscriptions or medieval manuscripts -- have a shelf life of millennia, and have proven it. In my own wandering way, I was for a time focused on medieval...

I've heard of Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms, but what exactly are Dyson 'dots'? As coined by Greg Matloff, C Bangs and Les Johnson in their book Paradise Regained, the term refers to a type of solar sail. These sails are not meant for moving things around the Solar System, but for reducing the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth. The authors imagine large numbers of the Dyson dots placed near the L1 point, using the momentum from solar photons to maintain their position. Imagine thousands -- maybe millions -- of these sails equipped with sensors to receive the instructions of their builders, communicate with each other, and make changes in the configuration of the swarm. Could you use a sail array like this to cool off the planet? From the book: ...using reasonable middle values for the parasol parameters -- 80 percent reflectivity or albedo, mass 53 grams per square meter, positioned 2,100,000 kilometers from Earth -- we would need almost 700,000 km2 of sunshade area to...

Solar Sail Symposium in July The 2nd International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) draws closer, the event occurring July 20-22 at New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. The focus will be on recent advances in solar sailing technologies and near-term solar sailing missions, with coverage of hardware, enabling technologies, concepts, designs, dynamics, navigation, control, modeling and mission applications and programs. The deadline for abstracts is May 15, 2010, with full information available at the symposium's Web site. Image: The IKAROS hybrid sail concept. A solar sail gathers sunlight as propulsion by means of a large membrane while a solar "power" sail gets electricity from thin film solar cells on the membrane in addition to acceleration by solar radiation. What's more, if the ion-propulsion engines with high specific impulse are driven by such solar cells, it can become a "hybrid" engine that is combined with photon acceleration to...

Project Ozma's Anniversary It was just fifty years ago today, April 8, 1960, when Frank Drake launched Project Ozma by turning the Green Bank, WV dish toward Tau Ceti. In a reminiscence of the project written for Cosmic Search magazine, Drake recalls the initial sense of anticipation, followed by examination of the chart recorder, which returned nothing but noise. When Tau Ceti set in the west, Drake and team pointed the telescope at Epsilon Eridani. Let Drake tell it: A few minutes went by. And then it happened. Wham! Suddenly the chart recorder started banging off scale. We heard bursts of noise coming out of the loudspeaker eight times a second, and the chart recorder was banging against its pin eight times a second. We had never seen anything like this before in all the previous observing at Green Bank. We all looked at each other wide-eyed. Could it be this easy? Some people had even predicted that the most rational extraterrestrial signal would be a slow series of pulses, as...

by Larry Klaes Faces from Earth is an ambitious plan to send information about our species to the stars. We've done this before, in the form of the plaques mounted on the Pioneer spacecraft and the famous Golden Record of Voyager. What more can we do to ensure that future missions leaving Earth will carry such representation? Larry Klaes puts Faces from Earth in context by looking at how the idea of such messaging has developed and where we might go from here. This post originally appeared as an editorial on the SETI League site and is reprinted with permission. For the vast majority of human existence, most members of our species rarely ventured beyond the borders of the places they were born and raised in their entire lives. For them, the whole world consisted of their family and their village. As for the other people in distant lands far away, they often had only a limited awareness of them, based mostly on stories told by visitors who had either been to these exotic realms...

Since starting this site in 2004, I've periodically emphasized the value of long-term thinking as we consider interstellar flight. This is not to suggest that travel to other stars will not undergo some kind of breakthrough that lets us manage it within a single human lifetime -- we can hope and work for such technological advances. Rather, the idea is that interstellar flight is unlikely to be achieved in the near future, and that being the case, we have to recover an older way of thinking, one that looks beyond immediate reward to achieving benefits for our descendants. That notion of carrying things forward motivated me when I wrote Centauri Dreams (the book), and naturally led to comparisons with long-term projects from the past, such as the great cathedrals of Europe. It also brought me to the well traveled story of the Oxford beams. It's a fascinating tale, one that gets across exactly the point I wanted to make in the book, but the more I researched it, the more I realized...

Nuclear Cannon A Descendant of Orion The new Carnival of Space is now out, from which I'll focus on Brian Wang's interesting notions on nuclear propulsion. The power behind the indispensable Next Big Future site, Brian has been writing about an Orion variant for some time now, one that should be able to get around the nuclear testing restrictions that put Orion itself into mothballs. A 1963 treaty effectively ended Orion's prospects, and in 1974 the Threshold Test Ban Treaty was signed, prohibiting the testing of nuclear devices with a yield exceeding 150 kilotons. What can we do with a 150 kiloton upper limit for underground devices, and how does it relate to pulsed propulsion? Wang envisions building what he calls a 'nuclear cannon,' capable of launching heavy payloads into Earth orbit. A 150 kiloton nuclear device is placed at the bottom of a two-mile shaft, packed with boron and other elements that will be converted to plasma. The 3500 ton launch projectile is placed on top. The...

When Peter Diamandis talks about the emergence of a 'let's just do it' mentality about spaceflight, anyone interested in getting our species off-planet will listen up. Diamandis, after all, as chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, has been a major force in making commercial space ventures newsworthy. Who can forget the first flight of Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne? Diamandis firmly believes we are no longer content to watch government astronauts work in space. It's time for the commercial sector to take off. In a new article in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to Erik Anderson for the heads-up), Diamandis lays out our biggest challenge in getting a space-based infrastructure into operation: The cost. Ponder the fact that as the US space shuttle fleet is closed down, American astronauts will need to hitch rides on the Russian Soyuz at a cost of over $50 million per person. That sounds high, and it is, but compare it to shuttle costs of between $750 to $2 billion per flight,...

Prospects for Interstellar Travel Be aware of Paul Titze's continuing exegesis of John Mauldin's book Prospects for Interstellar Travel (Univelt, 1992). I used Mauldin again and again as I developed my Centauri Dreams book, finding the dense and lengthy volume covered every conceivable aspect of interstellar flight as understood by current physics. But the book was published in a small press run and is hard to track down, although Amazon usually has a few copies from independent resellers available. Paul is doing the community a service by going through Mauldin chapter by chapter, highlighting the salient points with commentary. A quote from an early chapter: Relativity makes energy a serious problem through the limits imposed to prevent speeds greater than light. Relativity also offers tantalizing solutions: the slowing of time and Total Conversion of mass to energy. How closely propulsion might approach TC is explored in Chapter 4. One could hope to find a way to travel without the...

The New Horizons probe to Pluto/Charon is approaching Uranus' orbit, prompting the team's Twitter poster to remember Challenger's final crew in a tweet late yesterday. Challenger was lost on January 28, 1986, just as Voyager 2 reached Uranus, and thus we had the joy of a new planetary encounter mingling with grief for a fallen crew. I remember that day as vividly as anyone, I suppose. I was doing an intensive flight instruction seminar in Maryland, a weekend push that had me flying all day with students trying to improve their instrument landing skills. We were just headed out for another session when the news came, and a number of the pilots went to the closest TV to see for themselves. We looked and shook our heads in disbelief. Then we got back into our respective cockpits and took off again, trying to keep those images out of our minds to focus on things like holding patterns and ADF approaches. Grim memories because of their context. This morning also seems grim because of the...

Keeping up with Tibor Pacher isn't easy. My opponent on a bet about the future of interstellar flight (see the Long Bets site for details), Tibor has many irons in the fire, including what appears to be a labor of love called MiniSpaceWorld (MSW). The exhibit, now in its planning stages, will showcase the state of the art in rocketry and the directions our technology is taking us, all through miniatures and modeling. Tibor patterned the idea after the well-known Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, which taps the energy of model railroaders to create a rail-themed model universe. Extending the idea into the realm of astronautics is an attempt to educate and inspire a broad audience about space topics. MSW's layout is ambitious, ranging as far back in time as the earliest experiments in rocketry and moving out to the outer planets and beyond, all packed into roughly 3500 square meters in two levels. In December, the results of the first MSW design contest were presented at an award...

by Larry Klaes We now wrap up Larry Klaes' essay on Avatar (and Centauri Dreams' coverage of the film) with a look at how and why humans will expand into the cosmos, with reflections on our society's portrayal of aliens and of itself. How much does popular entertainment shape our conception of what we can and cannot do? Do we, as a species, have what it takes to journey out among the stars? Before anyone wonders, I am hardly against nature and preserving our natural resources. What I am against is the naive view that our technological progress is all bad and destructive to us as a species. Most of our ancestors lived primarily natural lives until not that many centuries ago and while their lives may have been less cluttered and polluted in one sense, they also tended not to live as long due to a lack of modern medicines and other useful products of a technological civilization. Even Henry David Thoreau, whom many uphold as the naturalist who declared we should all go back to the...

by Larry Klaes Judging by the abundant reaction to Larry Klaes' recent article on James Cameron's Avatar -- and by the continuing commentary in society at large -- Larry seems to be vindicated when he says the film has become a focal point of discussion for many in the general public. Having engaged in the lively debate in these pages, Larry now wraps up our Avatar coverage with a look at the film's message and its ramifications, along with comments on its use of science. To some the new film Avatar may seem like just another science fiction action-adventure flick designed to show off some new special effects while raking in the money for Hollywood and giving audiences some feel-good messages in the process. In Avatar's most essential sense, this is true. At their core, all films are about giving certain people jobs and making a profit through the entertainment of the masses. However, there are deeper messages to be found in Avatar, some of which the makers of this film and its...

by Larry Klaes We continue Larry Klaes' look at the James Cameron film Avatar, noting the technology with interest, but also examining the people involved and the always relevant question of how we deal with other cultures. How plausible are the creatures depicted in the film, and what sort of artistic choices forced Cameron's hand? On a broader level, what sort of a future will humans make for themselves if and when they develop interstellar flight? The starship that transported our hero, a Marine named Jake Sully, to Pandora made only a brief appearance at the beginning of the film. While nothing much was really said about this vessel, it did at least bear a resemblance to a craft that might actually operate in space at least during the next few centuries. This is in opposition to the starships of Star Trek and Star Wars, which often tend to be 'sexy', sleek to the point of being needlessly aerodynamic in the near vacuum of space. I do not recall the type of propulsion used by the...

by Larry Klaes Long-time Centauri Dreams readers will know that Larry Klaes is a frequent critic of the portrayal of science in movies, and in particular of the ways Hollywood looks at aliens and our interactions with them. Larry has again been to the cinema, this time to see the new James Cameron release Avatar. He brings back a rich description of the film along with numerous insights on its potential for reaching the public. When the United States was preparing to send the first humans to Earth's largest natural satellite in the 1960s with Project Apollo, there were numerous scientists of the day who protested this effort. They felt that knowledge and even surface material could be gathered from the Moon far more cheaply and efficiently with automated probes than with astronauts. On a technical and pragmatic level, those scientists were essentially correct. But as with many things in human society, the primary reasons for the existence of Apollo were about politics and power,...