Interstellar flight isn't about possibility as much as it is about time. We know we can launch a payload to another star if we're willing to burn up enough millennia -- about seventy -- to get there in the form of a Voyager-style flyby. That's with today's technology, and we can extrapolate how the time frame can be shortened with improved materials and propulsion techniques. So as Robert Forward always pointed out, it's not that interstellar flight is impossible -- it's that it's very difficult, and our expectations of the kinds of missions possible have to adapt to that fact. Intergalactic flight, though, is such an immense undertaking that I've rarely discussed it in these pages. Is there any conceivable technology that might make such a thing possible? Well, Carl Sagan and Iosif S. Shklovskii considered the situation in Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden-Day, 1966), working with the opportunity for time dilation opened up by special relativity. Accelerate at 1 g...

Of the many interesting questions Nick Nielsen raised in last Friday's post, the one that may be most familiar to the interstellar community is the question of potential breakthroughs. What happens if an unexpected discovery in propulsion makes all the intervening stages -- building up a Solar System-wide infrastructure step by step -- unnecessary? If we had the kind of disruptive breakthrough that enabled starflight tomorrow, wouldn't the society that grew out of that capability be fundamentally different than one in which starflight took centuries to achieve? I was mulling this over yesterday when I read Pluto-bound Probe Faces Crisis, a short article in Nature that several readers had passed along. With the New Horizons probe pressing on for a close-pass of Pluto/Charon next year, the assumption all along has been that it would make a course correction after the encounter to set up a flyby of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). The trick there is that the New Horizons team is running out...

Nick Nielsen today tackles an issue we've often discussed in these pages, the space-based infrastructure many of us assume necessary for deep space exploration. But infrastructures grow in complexity in relation to the demands placed upon them, and a starship would, as Nick notes, be the most complex machine ever constructed by human hands. Are there infrastructure options, including building such vehicles on Earth, and what sort of societies would the choice among them eventually produce? You'll find more of Nielsen's writing in his blogs Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon and Grand Strategy Annex. In addition to his continuing work for the space community, Nick is a contributing analyst with strategic consulting firm Wikistrat. by J. N. Nielsen Although we have spacecraft in orbit around Earth, as well as on the moon and other planets and their moons, and even spacecraft now in interstellar space, so that the products of human industry are to be found throughout our solar system...

Although we tend to focus on propulsion as the major obstacle to reaching another star, the biological problems that go along with journeys lasting decades or even centuries are equally daunting. If we could devise methods that would get us to Alpha Centauri within a century, we'd still face the need to keep a crew alive within a sustainable closed ecosystem for that amount of time. If we're talking humans in starships, then, we need a lot more data about how people interact in isolated communities, stay healthy, and manage critical self-sustaining systems. Image: A habitat for humans over generations, a worldship poses critical questions about survivability and genetic diversity. Credit: Adrian Mann. Centauri Dreams readers will recall Cameron Smith's interest in these matters, as reflected in his article Biological Evolution in Interstellar Human Migration, published here last March. The author of Emigrating Beyond Earth: Human Adaptation and Space Colonization (Springer, 2012),...

I will admit to an obsession with small, dim stars, one that goes far enough to take in those not-quite stars called brown dwarfs, objects too small to ignite hydrogen fusion. The WISE mission showed us that, at least in our Sun's neighborhood, brown dwarfs aren't as common as we once thought, with perhaps one of them for every six main sequence stars. For their part, red dwarfs are the prime currency of the galaxy, accounting for 75 to 80 percent of all stars, so between the two we have a host of venues for planets and, possibly, life. But so much needs to be done before we'll know if either brown or red dwarfs could really be candidates for astrobiology around them. These thoughts are triggered by more news from WISE, now in its reactivated incarnation as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). The spacecraft came back to life in September after 31 months of hibernation and is now working to help us identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, a...

Here's hoping Centauri Dreams readers in the States enjoyed a restful Thanksgiving holiday, though with travel problems being what they are, I often find holidays can turn into high-stress drama unless spent at home. Fortunately, I was able to do that and, in addition to a wonderful meal with my daughter's family, spent the rest of the time on long-neglected odds and ends, like switching to a new Linux distribution (Mint 16 RC) and fine-tuning it as the platform from within which I run this site and do other work (I've run various Linux flavors for years and always enjoy trying out the latest release of a new version). Leafing through incoming tweets over the weekend, I ran across a link to Stephen Cass' article in IEEE Spectrum on Plotting the Destinations of 4 Interstellar Probes. We always want to know where things are going, and I can remember digging up this information with a sense of awe when working on my Centauri Dreams book back around 2002-2003. After all, the Voyagers and...

Moving entire stars rather than building spaceships would have certain benefits as a way of traveling through the galaxy. After all, it would mean taking your local environment with you on a millennial journey. Some have suggested it might therefore be an observable sign of highly advanced civilizations at work. But how would you move a star in the first place? In Bowl of Heaven (Tor, 2012), Gregory Benford and Larry Niven conceive of a vast bowl -- think of one-half of a Dyson sphere -- wrapped around a star whose energies are directed into a propulsive plasma jet that, over aeons, moves the structure forward. Thus this snippet of dialogue, said aboard a starship by the humans who discover the alien artifact: "...You caught how the jet bulges out near the star." More hand waving. "Looks to me like the magnetic fields in it are getting control, slimming it down into a slowly expanding straw…" "A wok with a neon jet shooting out the back...and living room on the inside, more...

I often cite Robert Forward's various statements to the effect that "Travel to the stars is difficult but not impossible." Forward's numerous papers drove the point home by examining star travel through the lens of known physics, conceiving of ways that an advanced civilization capable of the engineering could build an interstellar infrastructure. But while Forward was early in this game, so were Iosif S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan. A Russian astronomer, Shklovskii had written a book's whose Russian title translates roughly as 'Universe, Life, Intelligence' in 1962. Four years later, Sagan would join Shklovskii as co-author and the two would tackle the original book afresh, adding new material that reflected on and expanded the 1962 version's ideas. The result was the volume now called Intelligent Life in the Universe. I sometimes recommend books that are essential parts of a deep space library, and this is surely one, significant not only for its historical treatment of starflight...

Joseph Green worked for 37 years in the American space program, retiring from NASA as Deputy Chief of the Education Office at Kennedy Space Center. His specialty was preparing NASA fact sheets, brochures and other semi-technical publications for the general public, explaining complex scientific and engineering concepts in layman's language. Joe is the author of over 20 science papers for NASA and contractor executives, but I ran across him decades ago through his novel The Loafers of Refuge (Ballantine, 1965), a paperback that sits on my shelf not three feet from where I'm writing. Joe's five science fiction novels, which include Star Probe (1976) and Conscience Interplanetary (1972), are complemented by about 80 shorter works, and he remains active writing for online magazines, with recent stories in the February and May 2013 issues of Perihelion Science Fiction. As Joe explains, 31 years at Kennedy Space Center puts a wonderful spin on recent events. Sometimes the future happens...

Tracking Voyager 1 outbound for the past decade has been at times anti-climactic. Had the spacecraft reached interstellar space or hadn't it, and how exactly would we know? The announcement last week that the milestone has been reached will forever mark August 25, 2012 as the date when a human-built object, still returning data, made the crossing. That it took a year of analysis only reminds us how much we have to learn about even this closest region of the space between the stars, where some interactions with the Sun continue. "We have been cautious because we're dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration," said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Only now do we have the data -- and the analysis -- we needed." Image: I use this image -- or one much like it -- all the time in my talks because it puts huge Solar System distances in perspective. The scale bar is measured in astronomical units...

Rachel Armstrong's presentation at Starship Congress so impressed me that I was quick to ask her to offer it here. I'm delighted to say that it will be only the first of what will become regular appearances in these pages. Much could be said about this visionary thinker, but here are some basics: Dr. Armstrong is co-director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) in Architecture & Synthetic Biology at The School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London, a 2010 Senior TED Fellow, and Visiting Research Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. She completed clinical training at the John Radcliffe Medical School at Oxford in 1991, and in 2009 embarked on a PhD in chemistry and architecture at University College London. Perhaps only someone with this kind of diverse training could tackle the novel approach to building materials called 'living...

The progress of New Horizons through the outer Solar System has me thinking back to Voyager's great encounters. In 1986, when Voyager 2 whisked past Uranus, I was about to head off for a weekend of intensive work as a flight instructor -- a client we had contracted with had a large number of pilots in need of recurrent training, and I knew I would be in the cockpit well into each night, as indeed I was. Those long days and the memory of Voyager at Uranus are, of course, tinged with the explosion of Challenger, which took place a scant four days after Voyager's closest approach to the planet. We were all riveted by the coverage of the event but could only catch it in between training flights, but I remember trying to keep my mind off the fallen Shuttle as we dealt with constantly challenging weather over Maryland and West Virginia. And it was only later that I was able to really sit down and go over the images from Uranus, whose system of moons had always intrigued me -- it has...

The Voyager spacecraft have run into their share of problems as they move toward true interstellar space, but on the whole their continued operations have been a testament to what well designed equipment can do. Voyager 2's camera platform locked for a time not long after the Saturn flyby but controllers were able to restore the system by experimenting with similar actuators on Earth. Three years ago the craft began having data problems resulting from a flipped bit in an onboard computer but a reset from Earth corrected the fault. Even the failure of the primary radio receiver not long after launch was resolved by the use of the onboard backup. Obviously both craft are living on borrowed time as the power output of their radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) continues to decline, but we should still be getting signals for another decade or so. With the Voyagers now on what is designated their 'interstellar mission,' it's pleasing to note that Alpha Centauri is the guide star...

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is the first person I know of to talk about worldships and their ramifications, which he did in an essay originally published in 1928. "The Future of Earth and Mankind" was the rocket pioneer's take on the need for enormous ships that could reach the stars in journeys taking thousands of years. The notion percolated quickly through science fiction, and by 1940 we have Don Wilcox's "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years," which ran in Amazing Stories. Wilcox, who taught creative writing at Northwestern University, imagined a ship's captain who, though kept in hibernation, wakes up every 100 years to check on his ship, watching the gradual degeneration of the successive generations of the crew. It's a bleak take on worldship travel that has often been echoed in later science fiction. But would a worldship actually be this horrific, a cruise from hell that lasted entire lifetimes? See Ken MacLeod's Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact (2005) for the worldship...

If humans go out into the Solar System and beyond drawing on the resources they find along the way, they don't necessarily have to do it on worldships of the kind we talked about yesterday. But it's a reasonable assumption that creating large space habitats would make engineering projects in deep space easier to implement, housing workers and providing a base for operations. Ken Roy presented ideas about habitats in the Kuiper Belt at Huntsville, including the possibility of a large colony being created inside objects like Pluto. If we choose to go that route, we'll have the kind of space expertise to create artificial objects similar to worldships to help ourselves along. Of course, we hardly need to limit ourselves to the Kuiper Belt for this kind of thinking. Whatever the design of the ships we use, we can also consider expansion into the vast cometary resources of the Oort Cloud and any other objects that may lurk there, including so-called rogue planets. For years we've kicked...

Existential risks, as discussed here yesterday, seem to be all around us, from the dangers of large impactors to technologies running out of control and super-volcanoes that can cripple our civilization. We humans tend to defer thinking on large-scale risks while tightly focusing on personal risk. Even the recent events near Chelyabinsk, while highlighting the potential danger of falling objects, also produced a lot of fatalistic commentary, on the lines of 'if it's going to happen, there's nothing we can do about it.' Some media outlets did better than others with this. Risk to individuals is understandably more vivid. When Apollo 8 left Earth orbit for the Moon in 1968, the sense of danger was palpable. After all, these astronauts were leaving an orbital regime that we were beginning to understand and were, by the hour, widening the distance between themselves and our planet. But even Apollo 8 operated within a sequenced framework of events. Through Mercury to Gemini and Apollo, we...

I for one am astounded at the fact that it has been seven years since the launch of New Horizons. The craft, now more than halfway between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, lifted off on January 19, 2006. I remember my frustration at having hundreds of cable channels on my television and not being able to see the New Horizons launch on any of them. I wound up tracking the event on a balky Internet transmission that, despite freezing up on more than one occasion, still got across the magic of punching this mission out into the deepest parts of the Solar System. With the flyby at Pluto/Charon in 2015, principal investigator Alan Stern is describing what his team is feeling as 'the seven year itch,' a sense of anticipation feeding off the spacecraft's continued good health along the way. Stern's latest report is online, noting that the current 'wake period' of the spacecraft (New Horizons was in hibernation from July of 2012 until January 6) is proceeding smoothly, including upload of...

Yesterday's look at radiation and its effects on humans in space asked whether any Fermi implications were to be found in the work described at the University of Rochester. One answer is that expansion into the cosmos does not need to be biological, for biological beings can build robotic explorers equipped with enough artificial intelligence to get the job done. A truly advanced civilization would be able to create large numbers of intelligent probes or, indeed, self-replicating probes that could spread throughout the galaxy on a timescale of perhaps ten million years. Fermi speculation is always fun but, when we get into the motivations of extraterrestrial civilizations, it leads inevitably to unfalsifiable solutions, good for conversation over coffee but incapable of producing a scientific result. Thus the 'zoo hypothesis,' the notion that the Earth is intentionally left alone to pursue its own development by beings with an agenda of their own. It makes for terrific science...

One rainy night in the mid-1980s I found myself in a small motel in the Cumberlands, having driven most of the day after a meeting and reaching Newport, TN before I decided to land for the night. It's funny what you remember, but small details of that trip stick with me. I remember the nicking of the wiper blades as I approached Newport, the looming shapes of the mountains in the dark, and most of all the fact that I was thinking about an interstellar mission. I was working on a short story that grew out of the Voyager mission and the experience of those who controlled it. After a late dinner at a restaurant near the motel, I asked myself what it would be like to be involved in a truly long-term mission. Suppose we develop the technologies to get a probe up to a few percent of the speed of light. If we send out a flyby mission to the nearest stars, we're talking about a couple of centuries of flight time, or maybe a bit less. It's inevitable, then, that a mission like this would be...

It was back in 1950 that Arthur C. Clarke looked at electromagnetic methods for getting a payload into space. The concept wasn’t new but Clarke’s paper in JBIS set out to examine what he saw as a practical use of it, an electromagnetic catapult on the lunar surface that could accelerate payloads back to Earth. The system was built around a three-kilometer long electromagnetic launcher that could accelerate payloads at 100 g’s to 2.3 kilometers per second (lunar escape velocity) in a matter of seconds. Gerard O’Neill thought such methods could deliver lunar raw materials to low Earth orbit for delivery to a space manufacturing site. Clarke’s ideas played naturally into O’Neill’s, for building large space habitats requires vast amounts of raw materials that we’d just as soon not have to lift out of Earth’s gravity well. But Clarke’s thinking wasn’t restricted to near-Earth uses of the technology. He saw no necessary limit to the lengths and accelerations that could be used. Provide...