Now that we have determined that the object now known as 1I/’Oumuamua is indeed interstellar in origin, is there any way we could launch a mission to study it? The study below, written by key players in the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), examines the possibilities. Andreas Hein is Executive as well as Technical Director of i4is, while Nikolas Perakis, a graduate student at the Technical University of Munich, serves as Deputy Technical director. Kelvin Long is president and co-founder of i4is; Adam Crowl, a familiar figure to Centauri Dreams readers, is active in its technical programs. Physicist and radio astronomer Marshall Eubanks is the founder of Asteroid Initiatives; systems engineer Robert Kennedy is president of i4is-US and general chair of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. Propulsion scientist Richard Osborne serves as i4is Director of Technology & Strategic Foresight. Their plan for 1I/’Oumuamua follows. For a more in-depth look, view the paper just...

With Voyager on my mind because of its recent anniversary, I had been exploring the Internet landscape for archival footage. But Ioannis Kokkinidis made my search unnecessary with the following essay, which links to abundant resources. The author of several Centauri Dreams posts including Agriculture on Other Worlds, Ioannis holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from the Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering of the Agricultural University of Athens. He went on to obtain a Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d'informations localisées pour l'aménagement des territoires (SILAT) from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier and a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. Now a resident of Fresno CA, Ioannis tells us in addition how a lifelong interest in space exploration was fed by the Voyager mission and its continuing data return.  by Ioannis Kokkinidis Introduction Back in the end of August 1989,...

I don't usually talk about spacecraft close to our own Sun, but exceptions invariably arise. Centauri Dreams took a close look at the Parker Solar Probe back in June, because its operations close to the Sun (within about 10 solar radii) have implications for how we might build the kind of spacecraft that can perform 'sundiver' maneuvers, approaching the Sun before deploying a solar sail for maximum effect (see Parker Solar Probe: Implications for Sundiver). Sundivers are one way to maximize acceleration for future interstellar missions. And then there's Venus, a planet I've written little about in these pages. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) concept study now being funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program is intriguing because it looks at spacecraft design from a fresh angle, actually one that harkens back to generations of mechanical devices that have had little part in space exploration. At least, until now. For while the environment on Venus...

It's worth thinking about why Voyager 1 and 2, now coming up on their 40th year of operation, are still sending back data. After all, mission longevity becomes increasingly important as we anticipate missions well outside the Solar System, and the Voyagers are giving us a glimpse of what can be done even with 1970's technology. We owe much of their staying power to their encounters with Jupiter, which demanded substantial protection against the giant planet's harsh radiation, a design margin still used in space missions today. The Voyagers were the first spacecraft to be protected against external electrostatic charges and the first with autonomous fault protection, meaning each spacecraft had the ability to detect problems onboard and correct them. We still use the Reed-Solomon code for spacecraft data to reduce data transmission errors, and we all benefited from Voyager's programmable attitude and pointing capabilities during its planetary encounters. Pioneer 6 was a doughty...

If Breakthrough Starshot succeeds in launching a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri in 30 or 40 years, their payloads will be highly miniaturized and built to specifications far beyond our capabilities today. But the small 'Sprites' launched into low Earth orbit on June 23 give us an idea where the research is heading. Sprites are 'satellites on a chip,' growing out of research performed by Mason Peck and his team at Cornell University, which included Breakthrough Starshot's Zac Manchester, who used a Kickstarter campaign to develop the concept in 2011 (see Sprites: A Chip-Sized Spacecraft Solution for background on the Cornell work). Breakthrough Starshot executive director Pete Worden refers to Sprites as 'a very early version of what we would send to interstellar distances,' a notion that highlights the enormity of the challenge while pointing to the revolutionary changes that may make such payloads possible. The issues multiply the more you think about them -- chip-like...

Back in the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society conceived the idea of designing a starship. The notion grew into Project Daedalus, often discussed in these pages, producing a final report that summed up what was then known about interstellar possibilities, from fusion propulsion to destination stars. Barnard's Star, 6 light years out, became the target because at the time, it was the only star for which evidence of planets existed, though that evidence later turned out to be the result of error in the instrument being used for the observations (more on this soon, in an essay I've written for the Red Dots campaign. I'll link to it as soon as it runs). The designing of Daedalus, much of it done in London pubs, was a highly significant event. What Alan Bond, Anthony Martin, Bob Parkinson and the rest were doing was not so much putting forth something that our civilization would build as sending us a clear message. Even at this stage of our development, humans could conceive of...

Beamed propulsion concepts are usually conceived in terms of laser or microwave beams pushing a lightsail. But as we've seen over the years, there are other ways of thinking about these things. Clifford Singer went to work back in the 1970s on the concept of pellet streams fired by an accelerator, each pellet a few grams in size. The idea here is to vaporize the pellets when they reach the spacecraft, their energy being redirected as a plasma exhaust. There are enough interesting variations on the idea that I'll probably return to it soon. But over the weekend, an email from Jeff Greason reminded me of Jordin Kare's unusual 'fusion runway' idea, to which he attached the moniker the 'Bussard Buzz Bomb.' Kare is an astrophysicist and space systems consultant with a background in laser technologies. He's been involved in studies of laser launch methods, in which beamed energy is focused on an onboard heat exchanger that converts liquid propellant into a gas to produce thrust. Currently...

If you have questions about beamed energy concepts, James Benford is your man. A plasma physicist who is CEO of Microwave Sciences, Benford has designed high-power microwave systems for the likes of NASA, JPL and Lockheed. Now Chairman of the Sail Subcommittee for Breakthrough Starshot, he is deep into the investigation of sail materials and design, as he explains below. After reading Greg Matloff's Near-Term Interstellar Probes: Some Gentle Suggestions, Jim passed along his comments, which highlight the need for a dedicated laboratory facility to explore the Starshot possibilities. He offers as well his thoughts on where sails stand in the overall propulsion landscape, a position of growing significance. By James Benford My colleague and old friend Greg Matloff has given us a well-informed broad survey of propulsion options for interstellar flight. I'm going to contribute a few comments. Even a century-long flight to Alpha Centauri requires a velocity of ~10,000 km/sec, which...

When Greg Matloff's "Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy" appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward's work, and realize that an interstellar community was growing in space agencies, universities and the pages of journals. Since those days, Matloff's contributions to the field have kept coming at a prodigious rate, with valuable papers and books exploring not only how we might reach the stars but what we can do in our own Solar System to ensure a bright future for humanity. In today's essay, Greg looks at interstellar propulsion candidates and ponders the context provided by Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions small sailcraft moving at 20 percent of the speed of light, bound for Proxima Centauri. What can we learn from the effort, and what alternatives should we consider as we ponder the conundrum of interstellar propulsion? by Dr....

Can we use a laser array to get a fast probe to another star? Breakthrough Starshot relies upon the notion, which was first advanced by Robert Forward all the way back in 1962, and subsequently considered by George Marx in 1966, along with hosts of researchers since. With beamed energy we leave the propellant behind, but as we’ve seen in our discussions of deceleration, there remains the problem of slowing down at the target. Breakthrough Starshot assumes a flyby, but the paper we looked at yesterday works out strategies for braking into orbit at the target star. Or more accurately, at the target stars, for multiple systems are assumed. Let’s dig back into that paper today, but first, let me make a brief administrative comment. The upcoming Breakthrough Discuss meeting in Palo Alto (I covered last year’s sessions) occurs at exactly the wrong time for me -- I’m locked into long-standing travel plans elsewhere. While I travel, there will be no Centauri Dreams posts for the rest of this...

Given his key role in the development of sail ideas for interstellar flight, Robert Forward inevitably comes up in any discussion of deep space missions. The late physicist put forward a number of sail concepts and mission ideas, including a laser-driven lightsail to Epsilon Eridani with return capability that would travel at 50 percent of the speed of light. Those were numbers that made a manned mission theoretically possible, though demanding a huge sail (1000 kilometers in diameter) and a mind-bending space-based 75,000 TW laser system. Yesterday we looked at the critical problem of deceleration in a sail-based interstellar mission, with reference to the new paper by René Heller and Michael Hippke. I only wish Forward were here to give us his thoughts on the newly proposed 'photogravitational assist' method of deceleration, because for years his own method for the Epsilon Eridani mission -- a 'staged' sail that separates, so that one sail ring reflects laser light back onto...

Given the distances involved, faster would always seem to be better when it comes to interstellar flight. Voyager, which took 12 years to get to Neptune and roughly 35 years to encounter the heliopause, would take 75,000 years to cross the 4.22 light years to Proxima Centauri. Voyager's 17 kilometers per second clearly doesn't cut it, but how fast can we realistically hope to go? Let's say we manage to build the phased laser array contemplated in the early Breakthrough Starshot discussions. Starshot's researchers contemplate driving small sails to 20 percent of the speed of light, a figure that should allow safe passage through the interstellar medium for a large percentage of the sails sent. But get to Proxima Centauri in 20 years and another problem arises: Each sail blows through the system in mere hours. In fact, at 0.2c, these sails cross a distance equivalent to the Moon's orbit around the Earth in six seconds. Hence the huge problem: How to explore the system we've reached? A...

Nothing built by humans has ever gotten as far from our planet as Voyager 1, which is now almost 21 billion kilometers from Earth. We've talked about the future of both Voyagers before in these pages -- Voyager 1 passes within about 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in some 40,000 years, its closest approach to a neighboring star. Voyager 2, which is now almost 17 billion kilometers out, closes to within 1.7 light years of Ross 248 in the same 40,000 years. My case for doing what Carl Sagan once discussed, giving each Voyager a final kick with its remaining hydrazine, so that those closing distances could be reduced, can be found in Voyager to a Star. It would be a symbolic and philosophical act rather than a scientific one, as both Voyagers are losing their ability to transmit data and will be silent in about a decade. And nothing can reduce those huge timeframes, which means that any such symbolic statement would be made to the future, a way of saying we are learning to be a...

If Breakthrough Starshot can achieve its goal of delivering small silicon chip payloads to Proxima Centauri or other nearby stars, it will be because we've solved any number of daunting problems in the next 30 years. That's the length of time the project's leaders currently sketch out to get the mission designed, built and launched, assuming it survives its current phase of intense scrutiny. The $100 million that currently funds the project will go into several years of feasibility analysis and design to see what is possible. That means scientists will work a wide range of issues, from the huge ground-based array that will propel the payload-bearing sails to the methods of communications each will use to return data to the Earth. Also looming is the matter of how to develop a chip that can act as all-purpose controller for the numerous observations we would like to make in the target system. If the idea of a spacecraft on a chip is familiar, it's doubtless because you've come across...

In early December the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics offered as part of its fall colloquium series a talk by Harvard's Avi Loeb, fortunately captured on YouTube as Project Starshot: Visiting the Nearest Star Within Our Lifetime. We've looked at Breakthrough Starshot in many posts on Centauri Dreams, including my reports from the last set of meetings in Palo Alto, but for those new to the concept of using a laser array to send small, instrumented sails to the Alpha Centauri stars, this video is a fine introduction. You'll recall that yesterday I talked about Robert Austin's futuristic Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope, with an illustration of what such an instrument might see of the exoplanet Gliese 832c. If Starshot can achieve its goals, it will be able to make out continent sized features on the surface of Proxima b, or perhaps a planet around Centauri A or B. It would achieve, in other words, what it would take a near-Earth space-based telescope 300 kilometers wide...

Who knows why and when we're going to remember things? In the bus on the way to Moffett Field for the second morning of the Breakthrough Starshot meetings, I found myself thinking about Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (1959). I had a paperback edition with a beautiful Richard Powers cover when I was a boy. What haunted me on that drive was the memory of what was written on the back: They built a ship called the Southern Cross and launched her to Alpha Crucis. Centuries passed, civilizations rose and fell, the very races of mankind changed, and still the ship fell on her headlong journey toward the distant star. After ten generations the Southern Cross was the farthest thing from Earth of any human work - but she was still not halfway to her goal. Breakthrough Starshot doesn't plan to take that long to reach one of the Alpha Centauri stars (Alpha Crucis, by the way, is not one of them, but a multiple star system that is a part of the beautiful asterism known as the Southern Cross)....

A lot of things can go wrong when you're working on a thirty-year project. Consider the charter of the systems subcommittee of Breakthrough Starshot, whose mission is to "...ensure that Starshot engineering activities can and will result in a 0.2c mission to Alpha Centauri." In the hands of the capable Kevin Parkin, the subcommittee has oversight over a systems team that will conduct system engineering, modeling and integration activities. I call Parkin 'capable' but, like so many of the people I dealt with at the recent meetings in San Francisco, he strikes me as flat-out brilliant. He's also a strategic thinker who knows how to communicate. Parkin's presentation on how to structure a project as complex as Starshot included classic failure modes of past projects, such as team members working with differing assumptions, a focus on details and not on the whole, and a focus on the whole and not on the details. Any one of these can trip you up. Walk a fine line, in other words, and try...

An interesting typo -- I had started to write 'On the plane back from Proxima b,' still a bit groggy from lack of morning coffee. Let's correct that to 'On the plane back from San Francisco.' I was coming back from the Breakthrough Starshot meetings, most of which took place at Moffett Field, a former naval air station that NASA owns through its adjacent Ames Research Center. Presume no NASA involvement, though -- Moffett Field is used by many and includes three university branch campuses as well as the building leased by Breakthrough Starshot. My plan had been to settle in on the plane with my notes as I worked out what to say about the trip. Instead, I succumbed to sleep for a good part of the journey. I had slept well each night, but the meetings were intense and the note-taking non-stop. I arrived two hours after the first of them began in a small boardroom, wedged myself into a chair in the corner after nodding hello to a number of familiar faces, and began taking notes by hand,...

If you're planning to make it to the International Space Development Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico next month, be advised that Brian McConnell will be there with thoughts on a subject we've discussed in several earlier posts: A 'spacecoach' that uses water as a propellant and offers a practical way to move large payloads (and crews) around the Solar System. Based in San Francisco, Brian is a technology entrepreneur who doubles as a software/electrical engineer. In the essay below, he looks at the spacecoach in relation to the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, where synergies come into play that may benefit both concepts. by Brian McConnell The spacecoach is a design pattern for a reusable solar electric spacecraft, previously featured on Centauri Dreams here and developed in A Design for a Reusable Water-Based Spacecraft Known as the Spacecoach (Springer Verlag), which I wrote with Alex Tolley. It primarily uses water as its propellant. This design has numerous benefits, chief...

Although the idea of a mission to the Sun's gravitational lens has been in Claudio Maccone's thinking for a long time, it has never been linked with the financial resources of a concept study like Breakthrough Starshot. The Italian physicist led a conference on mission concepts in the early 1990s and submitted a proposal for an ESA mission in 1993. What's striking to me is that throughout that time, Maccone has explored aspects of the mission he calls FOCAL that at one point seemed far too futuristic for our era. Could we, for example, do SETI with a FOCAL mission? Could we use it to enhance communications with an interstellar probe? The answer to both is yes, but the problem was pushing a spacecraft out to 550 AU in the first place, a challenge involving flight times of many decades. Then the Breakthrough Starshot initiative emerged and suddenly Maccone found himself in Palo Alto talking about a well-funded study, one that looked to FOCAL to support interstellar probes both in terms...