I get few questions that are harder to answer than 'what happened to the sense of adventure that we once had with Apollo?' And there are few questions I get more often, usually accompanied by 'how are we going to do starflight if we don't even have the will to go back to the Moon?' Both questions have unsettling answers, but the second question is open-ended. We can hope that the 'sense of sag' that Michael Michaud describes in talking about the post-Apollo period (for manned flight, at least) may itself evolve into something else, something far more hopeful. But let's dwell a moment on the first question. I've been looking over an essay Michaud wrote for Spaceflight in the mid-1970s, a decade of the Pioneers and the Voyagers, but also a decade when it became clear that our presence on the Moon with Apollo was going to be a short-lived affair. Instead, we were talking about Skylab, about docking operations between Soviet and American spacecraft, and the next big ticket item on the...

And for those of you who've been asking about the videos of presentations at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, they're now online. 2015, with New Horizons at Pluto/Charon and Dawn at Ceres, is shaping up to be an extraordinary year. Here's to the continuing effort to advance the human and robotic effort in deep space.

I'm cooking all afternoon in anticipation of a family dinner tonight. The first fruits of my labors are in the photo below. I cultivated the sourdough starter I use for this bread three years ago -- over the years, it has really developed some punch, and produces a fine, aromatic loaf. My afternoon now turns to large poultry, a country-sausage stuffing (with some of the sourdough bread as a key ingredient), various greens, beans and a chipotle-laden sweet potato dish I discovered last year. I leave it to my daughter to bring her usual spectacular salad and dessert. I want to wish all of you the best, and hope your day is going as well as mine. It's always a privilege to write for this audience.

Not long after I published my thoughts on Chris Nolan's film Interstellar, Centauri Dreams regular Larry Klaes weighed in with his own take. Views on Interstellar have been all over the map, no surprise given how personal film criticism can be (take a look at the critical reception of Bladerunner over the years). I like the point/counterpoint aspect of what Larry does here, and while I imagine most readers have seen the movie by now, his criticisms may provoke a few more viewings and, I hope, a look at Kip Thorne's excellent book on science in the making of the film. By Larry Klaes When I first heard about the existence of the film Interstellar, I was initially hopeful yet cautious. Most science fiction, especially these days, is some variation on Star Wars, which is often about as scientific and science fictional as the Harry Potter series. Yet Christopher Nolan and his team insisted they were striving hard to stick to REAL science with their production: They even had the famous...

My friend Frank Taylor was in town over the Thanksgiving holiday, having flown in from South Africa. With his wife Karen, Frank has spent the years since 2009 circumnavigating the globe aboard a 50-foot catamaran called Tahina, an adventure chronicled with spectacular photography on the Tahina Expedition blog. I highly recommend the site for anyone interested in travel and the sea, not to mention how high tech has transformed the ancient art of sailing. But when we spoke recently just before Frank returned to Africa, he had another kind of high tech in mind. Specifically, what had I thought about the film Interstellar? I haven't delayed my comments on the movie intentionally, but I was slow in getting to see it, missing the opportunity at the end of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop and then getting involved in recent activities including the One Earth New Horizons Message workshop at Stanford. I also wanted to read Kip Thorne's The Science of Interstellar (Norton, 2014) and...

What trajectory will our civilization follow as we move beyond our first tentative steps into space? Nick Nielsen returns to Centauri Dreams with thoughts on multi-generational projects and their roots in the fundamental worldview of their time. As the inspiring monuments of the European Middle Ages attest, a civilizational imperative can express itself through the grandest of symbols. Perhaps our culture is building toward travel to the stars as the greatest expression of its own values and capabilities. Is the starship the ultimate monument of a technological civilization? In addition to continuing work in his blogs Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex, Nielsen heads Project Astrolabe for Icarus Interstellar, described within the essay. by J. N. Nielsen If interstellar flight proves to be possible, it will be possible only in the context of what Heath Rezabek has called an Interstellar Earth: civilization developed on Earth to the degree that it is capable...

Even though its arrival on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko did not go as planned, the accomplishment of the Rosetta probe is immense. We have a probe on the surface that was able to collect 57 hours worth of data before going into hibernation, and a mother ship that will stay with the comet as it moves ever closer to the Sun (the comet's closest approach will be on August 13 of next year). What a shame the lander's 'docking' system, involving reverse thrusters and harpoons to fasten it to the surface, malfunctioned, leaving it to bounce twice before it landed with solar panels largely shaded. But we do know that the Philae lander was able to detect organic molecules on the cometary surface, with analysis of the spectra and identification of the molecules said to be continuing. The comet appears to be composed of water ice covered in a thin layer of dust. There is some possibility the lander will revive as the comet moves closer to the Sun, according to Stephan Ulamec...

Back in the 1970s, Peter Glaser patented a solar power satellite that would supply energy from space to the Earth, one involving space platforms whose cost was one of many issues that put the brakes on the idea, although NASA did revisit the concept in the 1980's and 90's. But changing technologies may help us make space-based power more manageable, as John Mankins (Artemis Innovations) told his audience at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop. What Mankins has in mind is SPS-ALPHA (Solar Power Satellite by means of Arbitrarily Large Phased Array), a system of his devising that uses modular and reconfigurable components to create large space systems in the same way that ants and bees form elegant and long-lived ecosystems on Earth. The goal is to harvest sunlight using thin-film reflector surfaces as part of an ambitious roadmap for solar power. Starting small -- using small satellites and beginning with propulsion stablization modules -- we begin scaling up, one step at a...

People keep asking what I think about Christopher Nolan's new film 'Interstellar.' The answer is that I haven't seen it yet, but plan to early next week. Some of the attendees of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop were planning to see the film on the event's third day, but I couldn't stick around long enough to join them. I've already got Kip Thorne's The Science of Interstellar queued up, but I don't want to get into it before actually seeing the film. I'm hoping to get Larry Klaes, our resident film critic, to review Nolan's work in these pages. Through the Wormhole Wormholes are familiar turf to Al Jackson, who spoke at TVIW on the development of our ideas on the subject in science and in fiction. Al's background in general relativity is strong, and because I usually manage to get him aside for conversation at these events, I get to take advantage of his good humor by asking what must seem like simplistic questions that he always answers with clarity. Even so, I've asked...

One thing the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop did not offer was a lot of spare time. Les Johnson told attendees at the beginning that we would be working straight through. Between presentations and workshop sessions, that was pretty much the case, with no break at all between an 8:00 start and lunch, and afternoon sessions punctuated by breakout workshop sessions on four topics: communications and SETI; biology in small ecosystems; safety issues for interstellar missions; and a competition to reverse-engineer famous starships from science fiction literature. I finished up the after-dinner workshop session around 9:30 that first night. An Encounter with 'Dr. SETI' It was a pleasure to finally meet the SETI League's Paul Shuch in Oak Ridge. Paul and I have exchanged email for some time now, mostly about material we might use on our respective sites, and I've long admired the engineering and leadership skills he brings to a SETI all-sky survey that coordinates the efforts of 127...

When he opened the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge last week, Les Johnson told the audience that sessions would begin and end on time. Punctuality is a trait that I assume works well in Johnson's day job at Marshall Space Flight Center, and it certainly was appreciated in Oak Ridge, where the delays and overruns that mar so many conferences just didn't occur. That kept the pace brisk and the presenters solidly on topic throughout. That sense of pace and direction is making TVIW into one of my favorite gatherings. Today I'm going to run through some of the presentations from the first day, beginning with the multidisciplinary note with which I closed yesterday's post. What we gain by keeping a wide range of background in play among the presenters is a chance to spot hidden assumptions, some of which can prove deadly when not properly evaluated. Monday's TVIW talks helped clarify what we've learned about the human presence in space and just how much we have yet to...

When I was last in Oak Ridge, TN for the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in 2011, I arrived late in the evening and the fog was so thick that, although I had a map, I decided against trying to find Robert Kennedy's house, where the pre-conference reception was being held. This year the fog held off until the first morning of the conference (it soon burned off even then), and I drove with Al Jackson out to the Kennedy residence, finding the quiet street surrounded by woods still lit with fall colors and the marvelous clean air of the Cumberland foothills. A house full of interstellar-minded people makes for lively conversation almost anywhere you turn. I quickly met the SETI League's Paul Shuch, with whom I've often corresponded but never spoken to in person, and our talk ranged over SETI's history, the division into a targeted search and a broader survey (the latter is the SETI League' bread and butter), and why looking for signals through a very narrow pipe (Arecibo) should...

Aerospace engineer and science fiction novelist Gerald Driggers will be a guest on The Space Show, hosted by David Livingston, tomorrow (Monday) at 5 PM Eastern US time (2200 UTC). You can listen to the show here. Centauri Dreams readers know Gerald as a champion of space colonization efforts going back to the days of the L-5 Society in the 1960s and 1970s, but of late he's been chronicling our prospects on Mars with novels like The Earth-Mars Chronicles Vol. 1 Hope for Humanity. He's also just released an Amazon short called Butterscotch Dawn. On Livingston's show, expect discussion of the large-scale settlement of Mars and the role of the Red Planet in our species' colonization of the larger Solar System. The show will be archived at http://www.thespaceshow.com.

Over the years we've discussed many concepts for ships that could take us to the stars (they're all in the archives), and none of them are without problems. Although Les Shepherd was analyzing antimatter possibilities by 1952 and solar sails were already coming into the mix, I'd argue that the first design that looked like a feasible way to get a human crew up to a high percentage of lightspeed was Robert Bussard's ramjet. Introduced in a 1960 paper, the idea was the subject of Carl Sagan's scrutiny in Sagan and Shklovskii's Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), but later fell afoul of an apparent showstopper: The ramscoop produces more drag than thrust. It's a measure of the magnitude of the interstellar problem that so many different concepts continue to emerge. Theorists have been banging away at starship engineering for sixty years and even longer if we go back to the musings of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and early thinkers like Olaf Stapledon and John Desmond Bernal. When Sten...

Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at the National Institute of Aerospace, takes aim at interstellar flight in a recent essay for the Huffington Post. Dr. Odenwald's critique makes many valid points by way of showing how difficult the interstellar challenge is. I am much in favor of articles that do this, because putting a payload past or around another star is extraordinarily difficult, and every point that Odenwald raises has to be addressed by our science. Interstellar flight is also going to take buy-in from the public, whose economic resources will be in play to create the needed Solar System infrastructure and, eventually, the vehicles we will send on these journeys. That puts the economic issue up front, for while we can name a number of technologies that do not violate known physics -- beamed sails, fusion drives, ion drives and perhaps one day, antimatter -- we have to find the means of paying for their development. Thus a key part of Dr. Odenwald's critique, which draws on a...

Librarian and writer Heath Rezabek (and since he's birthing what looks to me to be a book, I should probably refer to him as a novelist as well) has been exploring the ways we might use archives to explore our civilization even as we ensure its survival against existential risk. Heath uses speculative fiction to examine and portray possibilities, in this case invoking future technologies that will inevitably shape our creation and use of archives. He's also, as described below, a co-founder of Project Astrolabe, an attempt now underway for Icarus Interstellar to research the ways an interstellar civilization might grow while securing its heritage. Artificial intelligence comes into play, but Heath here looks into ideas even farther afield. by Heath Rezabek I began the Woven Light speculative fiction series as a way to explore themes and possibilities surrounding not only very long term archival issues, but also some potent technologies which might be beneficial or likely to unfold in...

A truncated schedule this week as I attend to a pressing project that needs all my attention. So no post today or Wednesday, but back Thursday with a look at the Alpha Centauri planet hunt and the still-unresolved question of Centauri Bb. For the short interval, I'll leave you with this quote from Lee Billings on the nature of deep time and genuine perspective. Deep time is something that even geologists and their generalist peers, the earth and planetary scientists, can never fully grow accustomed to. The sight of a fossilized form, perhaps the outline of a trilobite, a leaf, or a saurian footfall can still send a shiver through their bones, or excavate a trembling hollow in the chest that breath cannot fill. They can measure celestial motions and list Earth's lithic annals, and they can map that arcane knowledge onto familiar scales, but the humblest do not pretend that minds summoned from and returned to dust in a century's span can truly comprehend the solemn eons in their...

I don't envy the track chairs at any conference, particularly conferences that are all about getting large numbers of scientists into the right place at the right time. Herding cats? But the track model makes inherent sense when you're dealing with widely disparate disciplines. Earlier in the week I mentioned how widely the tracks at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston ranged, and I think that track chairs within each discipline -- already connected to many of the speakers -- are the best way to move the discussion forward after each paper. Still, what a job. My friend Eric Davis, shown at right, somehow stays relaxed each year as he handles the Propulsion & Energy track at this conference, though how he manages it escapes me, given problems like three already accepted presentations being withdrawn as the deadline approached, and one simple no-show at the conference itself. Unfortunately, there were no-shows in other tracks as well, though the wild weather the night before the...

"While other nations try to reach the moon, we are trying to reach the village," said Julius Nyerere, who after serving as Tanzania's first president retired to the village of his childhood. Mae Jemison likes to use this quote to introduce what she sees as a major theme of the 100 Year Starship project, which is that as we look for the extraordinary, we have the opportunity to impact things today. The connection between future and present is pivotal because spinoffs happen, and so does philosophy. Space is another platform from which to see ourselves. It's estimated that 500 million people watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon, the largest television audience for a live broadcast to that time. That impacts education and the making of careers as the surge in technicians and researchers in the Apollo era translates to role models for children and goals for the culture at large. In her opening address to the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, Jemison said that the project's...

"A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." So sang Simon & Garfunkel in their 1968 ballad "The Boxer." Human nature seems to drive us to look for what we most want to happen. It's a tendency, though, that people who write about science have to avoid because it can lead to seriously mistaken conclusions. In science itself there is a robust system of peer review to evaluate ideas. It's not perfect but it's a serious attempt to filter out our preconceptions. As with the flap about 'faster than light' neutrinos at CERN, we want as many qualified eyes as possible on the problem. Journalists come in all stripes, but of late there has been a disheartening tendency to prove Paul Simon's axiom. Not long ago we went through a spate of news stories to the effect that NASA was investigating warp drive. True enough -- the Eagleworks team at Johnson Space Center, under the direction of Harold "Sonny" White, has been looking at warp drive possibilities for some time, though it...