Back in 1999, with NASA's Interstellar Probe Science and Technology Definition Team investigating the possibility of reaching another star, then administrator Dan Goldin exhorted the agency to push its limits. "We have to set goals so tough it hurts — that it drives technology — in semiconductors, materials, simulation, propulsion," he told reporters, and later that year he described a new kind of space vehicle, one that taps advances in genetic algorithms, neural nets and nanotechnology. Those were breathtaking days, if short-lived. We were in a new intellectual space, a long way from Apollo. Reconfiguring the Metaphor Is a reconfigurable probe the size of a Coke can, one that taps local materials to adapt to a remote star system, what we might call a 'starship'? Charles Stross asks this question in a recent essay, noting that the Pioneers, Voyagers and New Horizons we've sent on missions that will reach interstellar space are starships, but not in the popular sense. The...

Focus on FOCAL I'm just back from a weekend in Texas, meeting with Hal Puthoff and Eric Davis at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin and spending a great deal of time with Claudio Maccone, who flew in from Italy and goes on from Texas to a presentation at the SETI Institute. Our subject was largely FOCAL, the ambitious mission Maccone has championed to develop a spacecraft that can be sent to the Sun's gravitational lens at 550 AU and beyond. Because gravity-focused radiation remains along the focal axis beyond 550 AU, such a spacecraft would continue making high-quality observations in various wavelengths long beyond this distance. We live in an era of tight budgets and, to put it bluntly, lack of vision. Although FOCAL requires only near-term advances in technology and would represent the most ambitious undertaking ever attempted in space, the problem will be to find the funding to make it happen. A second issue is to develop a critical mass of scholarship in support of...

My friend Tibor Pacher reports that the MiniSpaceWorld Design Contest is getting quite interesting, with six submissions of high quality, all going in different directions. Tibor's goal is to build a scale model world that, like the famous Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, shows off space technology in tiny, exquisite detail. We're used to seeing this kind of thing particularly in the model railroad world, so why not extend the idea into space as a tool for educators? Now you can go to the site to see basic maps from the contestants. The contest award ceremony is to be held in Budapest on December 5 in the Congress Hall of the Research Centre for Social Studies, a Hungarian Academy of Sciences institute, and as Tibor notes, this is in the Budapest castle district, so there is much more to do in the area for those lucky enough to attend. Be aware that voting on the submissions is open until November 15, and have a look at the MSW site for more information.

Back in 2003, I went to Glenn Research Center in Cleveland for a meeting with Marc Millis. The Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project that Millis headed had recently been shut down, but I had the sense that this might be temporary and was eager to talk to him about what BPP had thus far accomplished. My feeling about its reinstatement proved to be inaccurate, and just four years later, NASA also shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts in Atlanta, leaving a conceptual void at the agency's core. Two Takes on Futuristic Studies NIAC and BPP were working opposite sides of the street even when both were fully funded. Whereas NIAC took a more short-term perspective, funding research projects with implications for space in the not distant future, BPP plunged into far more theoretical terrain, looking at everything from engineering the vacuum to wormhole physics and the potential for warp drive. You could trace some of this impulse back to the Vision-21 gathering in 1990 at what was...

The decision to close NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in 2007 was a blow to the research community, especially given the fact that the agency's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project had been shelved some years previously. These twin haymakers to the study of futuristic technologies emphasized the lack of support for spending money on anything beyond the near-term, and reminded us that forty years after the fact, we still can't manage even a return to the Moon. NIAC seemed to offer better. Established in 1998, the Atlanta-based program offered non-NASA scientists a chance to delve into revolutionary space and aeronautics concepts, with a multi-tiered funding strategy and the potential for the best ideas to receive further study within the agency (or in a number of cases, from sources outside it). NIAC was hardly a budget-breaker, totalling $36.2 million spread across the nine years of its existence. A New Report Looks at Invigorating Research Now we have a new report...

On Perfect Mornings Stan Getz' version of 'Early Autumn' is to me the definitive take on this standard, though so many fine musicians have attempted it that I'm sure to draw an argument from jazz buffs. But every year when the leaves have just begun to turn, the Getz interpretation runs through my mind on my morning walk, as it did today. A fine breeze was in the air and it carried the scent of approaching rain. The leaves wrapped the scene in muted gold and vermilion, not as bright as in some years, but lovely just the same. So perfect was the moment that it called up a quote from J.B Priestley that I only imperfectly remembered. When I got back to my desk, I looked up the exact wording: I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning. Early CoRoT Results Available Early results from CoRoT are now appearing in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics (Vol. 506 No. 1), running...

There is welcome news from Greg Matloff. His new book, written with the artist C Bangs and physicist Les Johnson (NASA MSFC) will be published by Springer/Praxis in December. Following on the success of Solar Sails, the latest is Paradise Regained, a look at how we might use the resources of the Solar System to alleviate environmental problems here on Earth. Here's an absorbing video presentation on the book. [youtube yes7-rPQSjI 500 375] Extending Earth's resource base beyond our atmosphere, and in the process protecting the Earth from asteroid and comet impact, is essential as we gradually become not just a terrestrial but, in Matloff's words, a cosmic species. "If we are wise enough to work together on this, terrestrial life in the Solar System can live as long as the Sun," says the author, an optimism that should resonate with Centauri Dreams readers.

Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage is one of my favorite CDs, as definitive a statement of Hancock's jazz artistry as, say, A Song for My Father is for Horace Silver's craft, or Giant Steps for John Coltrane's. But Maiden Voyage, particularly the title track, has that sense of relentless, questing motion that energizes me about all journeying. It's restlessness mixed with inevitability, an Odyssean fling with great events in a vast and unknowable sea. Such thoughts come to mind this morning because I've been paging through Giulio Magli's Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy (Copernicus, 2009) while listening to Hancock's work. It's a lively and amusing book, amusing because Magli (Politecnico of Milan) enjoys taking swipes at colleagues as well as earlier scholars, and it plumbs the depths of sites around the world where our ancestors either did or might have aligned their structures with celestial objects. Some of these places remain controversial, because there are a lot of...

Modeling a Space-Based Future The submission deadline for the MiniSpaceWorld contest has, according to Tibor Pacher, been extended to November 1. Those with a yen to build scale models with a space theme should be considering the possibilities in the project, an exhibit showcasing everything from current rocket technology to basic principles of physics and astronomy, space travel as seen in science fiction and more. MiniSpaceWorld draws on the inspiration of the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, which does for model railroads what Pacher hopes to do for space-themed modelers and educators. Image: Tibor Pacher, who leads the MSW effort. With the help of the Roland Eötvös Physical Society, the MSW design particulars are now being circulated to 1500 secondary school physics teachers in Hungary, which is the reason for the deadline extension. Full particulars can be found on the site, where I notice that the design contest award ceremony will be held in Budapest on December 5. The Hamburg...

Learning how we connect with the universe is one of the most fruitful investigations of modern science. No matter how we approach the matter, we're confronted with interesting possibilities. We study how gas giant planets may affect life on inner, terrestrial worlds by diverting asteroids from potential impacts. We look at issues like panspermia, wondering whether life's building blocks (or even life itself) arrived from elsewhere in the cosmos. In recent times, we've examined our Solar System's movements through the galaxy to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. As we widen stellar habitable zones into galactic ones, our musings take us out into the universe. They also confront us with our own limitations -- our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler, see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter. Kaler calls our visual spectrum "...but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long." That...

The other day I made a crack about a particular piece of artwork not being up to snuff, said item being an illustration accompanying a news release about a recent astronomical find. Maybe I was just out of sorts that day. In any case, what's significant to me about much of the artwork floating around to illustrate news stories is that it's generally quite good. Sure, we're talking about 'artist's concepts' of things like exoplanets and other distant objects, but they're usually concepts informed by current data and they're well executed. Then I ran across Jeff Foust's essay on art and space in the Space Review and got to thinking about what had propelled me as a kid into this kind of work. We had a fabulous network of community libraries in St. Louis back in the 1950s and '60s, and I made good use of three of them in particular. I'd stock up on science books and more or less read the astronomy sections straight through, starting at one end and working across. The photographs of...

Whenever I hear the word 'serendipity,' I think of my old mentor Norman Eliason, professor of medieval studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. During my years of grad work, Dr. Eliason passed along habits of precision and an eye for detail that I've tried, not always successfully, to emulate. One day when he asked about my work habits, I told him that I preferred to work outside the library, checking out books I needed or making copies of relevant journal articles. I can still see him nodding slowly in his office chair, cigarette protruding from his hand, and I knew I'd said the wrong thing. "You need to be among the books," he said. "Use your free time to look around and you'll run into things in the stacks you never knew were there." I took his advice and he was right. Serendipity --chance discovery, usually when looking for something else -- worked. At least, it always has for me, but you have to put yourself in a place where discoveries are likely to be made. Image: Serendipitous discoveries...

It's easy to cite science fiction technologies that made their way into real life, starting with, say, submarines and the Jules Verne connection, and pushing on into air travel and, eventually, a spaceship to the Moon. It's also easy to find numerous examples of science fiction being blindsided by technologies no one really predicted. I've read "A Logic Named Joe," but other than Murray Leinster's prescient 1946 tale, did anyone really predict the advent of computers small enough to fit on your desktop, or mobile devices that connect us to a worldwide network for communications and data transfer? Predictions or Dry Runs? This is where I think some science fiction enthusiasts make a mistake in trying to sell their genre as a predictive force. Sure, the examples are there, and we have visionaries like Arthur Clarke who, in addition to crafting spectacular novels of the future, managed to introduce communications satellites into the pages of a popular magazine (Wireless World) before...

Do you have any astronomy books you could spare? Larry Klaes has passed along word from Mimi Burbank, a friend from the History of Astonomy e-mail list who lives and works in Uganda. Living in Kasese, Mimi has been involved in educational activities for people living in a rural area with few resources. She's trying to gather books on astronomy from childrens' books up to adult levels. Mimi writes as follows: The people here are very poor and there are no resources for education, and so I have been asking my friends from all around the world to send books and other things. I have received almost a hundred books for children of all ages, and the little NGO that I work with (BUFO) has achieved extremely high scores on their leaving exams at the end of the school year. They have instituted a Saturday reading hour, during which the older children who can read, read stories out of the books to the younger children who can not yet read, and they all love it. This is the beginning of a...

On Returning to the Moon Interesting to see that the recent debate in the pages of The Economist on whether or not we should return to the Moon has reference to the outer Solar System. The debate pits Gregg Maryniak (James S. McDonnell Planetarium, St. Louis) against Mike Gold (Bigelow Aerospace). Normally the Moon is off our agenda in these pages because of our focus on the outer system and beyond, but my friend Frank Taylor noticed that among Maryniak's arguments for a return to the Moon was its utility as a staging point. Specifically, Maryniak argues that in addition to its other uses, the Moon lets us get our 'space legs' by learning about shielding human crews and 'living off the land' in a deeply inhospitable place. All of this may well lead to lunar power stations or the collection of Helium-3 for fusion projects, a developing technology with profound implications. Writes Maryniak: Once we have the ability to capture and transmit energy at the megawatt and gigawatt levels we...

Propulsion Book Discussion Available Give a look, and then a listen, to David Livingston's August 3rd Space Show. Livingston talked to Tau Zero founder Marc Millis and Eric Davis (Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin) about the recently published Frontiers of Propulsion Science, calling it "the ultimate research and reference book to have for advanced and out-of-the-box space propulsion science" and adding: "As you will hear me say over and over again, this is a must own and a must read book. It is also a very valuable research and reference book for anyone wanting to know propulsion and physics facts regarding space travel and related issues." Knowing how much time and effort Marc and Eric spent coordinating the many contributions from leading authorities that went into this book, it's a pleasure to see Frontiers of Propulsion Science achieving this kind of acclaim. At 739 pages and stuffed with technical and scientific papers aimed at scientists and university students, the...

Tau Zero in the Press Edinburgh-based journalist Ian Brown offers up an overview of interstellar issues in Scotland's Sunday Herald. The core of the story is an interview Brown conducted with Tau Zero founder Marc Millis, who as Brown notes was formerly the manager of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project. The Tau Zero Foundation grows out of that work (though it retains no NASA connection), and it's good to see us getting publicity in a popular science story that captures TZF's imaginative spirit while avoiding sensationalism. Brown calls us "a grass-roots network of physicists, mathematicians, engineers and science journalists," an accurate description. Here's a snippet quoting Millis on the nature of interstellar striving: "How much we accomplish is, of course, tied to the resources we acquire. The focus will be on making incremental progress rather than big projects." As a physicist, he knows the sheer immensity of the challenge. Many scientists believe we will never...

I sometimes wonder whether Neil Armstrong wrestled all the way to the Moon with what he would say when he stepped out onto the surface. The answer is probably tucked away somewhere in the abundant literature on the Moon landings. I know that if it were me, I'd be turning over the options in my mind for months in advance. What do you say upon achieving what is obviously one of the most significant accomplishments in history? Did Armstrong ponder alternatives even as he descended from the lander? In any case, the words carried a great truth. Giant leaps are made up of small steps, and not just the first step of a single astronaut leaving a footprint. It wasn't just a Saturn V that got Apollo 11 to the Moon -- it was also Einstein, and Newton, and Leibniz, and thousands of mathematicians, physicists, engineers and yes, philosophers throughout history whose work pushed the possibility forward. This is, not coincidentally, the philosophy of the Tau Zero Foundation: ad astra incrementis....

I'm just in from an early morning walk around the streets of Aosta, enjoying a brisk spring morning. The streets at this hour are largely empty and the Sun lights the nearby peaks. We have a heavy session of papers on this last day of the conference, and we had an even longer day yesterday, followed by my public lecture at the Aosta town hall last night. Following the talk, Giancarlo Genta, his lovely wife Franca, and Guido Cossard, the assessore of cultural affairs (who turns out to be an astronomy buff and something of an expert on archaeoastronomy), took me on a walk around town looking at medieval and Roman sites. We wound up having a late night beer and I didn't get in until 1:30. This is a travel day, as I change hotels in preparation for tomorrow's flight from Milan. So I'm going to hold any of the discussion about the papers yesterday, which were so rich that I'd prefer to get into them when I have more than a few minutes. In particular, the solar sail sessions opened my eyes...

Today we get into the heart of this interstellar conference, with multiple sessions on propulsion via solar and electric sail, as well as looks at specific mission concepts and robotic applications in deep space. I spent a good part of our bus ride back from Bard castle yesterday talking to Pekka Janhunen, creator of the electric sail concept, about its possible interstellar applications. Pekka does not believe this system, based on electric tethers riding the solar wind, could muster the velocity to go interstellar, but he does see it as a viable candidate for braking into a destination system, and just as important, exploring it. I'm anxious to get the latest on his work and also to look at fusion alternatives, which Claudio Maccone will present now that we've learned that Claudio Bruno can't make it here. As I get ready for the day to start, I'll drop in here some notes from the first day. These are no more than a skeletal outline -- I'll use the conference proceedings when I get...