The British Interplanetary Society's Kelvin Long is no stranger to these pages, perhaps best known as the founder and first leader of Project Icarus, but an indefatigable writer on interstellar topics as well. Kelvin's first book, Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, is scheduled for publication by Springer later this year. Fellow writer Pat Galea has a background in electronic engineering and physics, and has been a professional software engineer since 1993. As well as contributing to the Project Icarus starship design, he is a supporter of Monkey World in the UK, and a staunch advocate for preserving Bletchley Park, home of World War 2 code breaking. Both Long and Galea are Tau Zero practitioners as well. The duo here offer us an overview of a symposium Kelvin recently organized in London that as far as I know was a first: A conference entirely devoted to the breathtaking concept of interstellar colony craft potentially hundreds of kilometers long. by Kelvin F....

The first conference devoted solely to worldships takes place today in London at the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society. It seemed a good time to check in with Gregory Matloff, a man I described when writing Centauri Dreams (the book) as the 'renaissance man of interstellar studies.' Perhaps best known for his continuing work on solar sails, Matloff's interests have nonetheless ranged widely. He brought deep space propulsion to a wide audience in his book The Starflight Handbook (1989), which covers the full spectrum of interstellar options, but for over three decades has continued to produce scientific papers investigating issues ranging from laser ramjets to beamed microwave missions. A recent interest has been the expansion of the human biosphere into space, as discussed in books like Paradise Regained: The Regreening of Earth (Springer, 2009) and the soon to be published Biosphere Extension: Solar System Resources for the Earth, written with C Bangs. These last...

by Richard Obousy After a stint as project leader for the Project Icarus starship design study, Richard Obousy now serves as Module Lead Primary Propulsion for the effort. Dr. Obousy's doctoral work at Baylor University focused on the possibility that dark energy could be an artifact of Casimir energy in extra dimensions. For Icarus, he has pivoted to the study of fusion propulsion systems for this ongoing reworking of the original Project Daedalus concept. He's also fascinated with the possibilities of getting off our planet more easily and establishing a human presence on Mars, all ideas he was able to explore at the Mars Society's latest meeting, from which this report. As a native of Texas, living only a couple of hours drive from Dallas, I was thrilled to discover that that was where the Mars Society planned to hold its 14th International Mars Society Convention. This was a perfect opportunity for me to meet space enthusiasts, to present to this community some of the ideas...

Anyone who looks back on Robert Heinlein's 'juvenile' novels, twelve books written for young adults between 1947 and 1958, as inspiration for his current work gets my attention. I loved every one of those novels, particularly Citizen of the Galaxy (1957) and Starman Jones (1953), but David Neyland says it was Time for the Stars (1956) that got him thinking about the 100 Year Starship Study. If you've been keeping up with Centauri Dreams, you know that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which handles cutting-edge research and development for the US military, is putting on a starship symposium this fall in Orlando, FL. This follows up on the earlier DARPA Request for Information and will lead to the award of $500,000 or so in seed money to an organization that can best pursue the study's goals. Neyland, who is director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, has been explaining what the study is all about to newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which ran a story on...

The Project Icarus team has founded a non-profit research organization called Icarus Interstellar, its goal being to 'foster research into those necessary technologies which can make interstellar research a reality' through the study of such topics as fusion, nanotechnology, advanced power sources and other critical drivers for interstellar flight. We've tracked Icarus here from the beginning, when it emerged as an ambitious attempt to update and re-think the original Project Daedalus starship design of the 1970s. Taking fusion as its propulsion mechanism, the Icarus team now seeks to analyze and design a probe in terms of recent advances in numerous fields. How do you go about designing a starship? Something this speculative, which must of necessity rely on extrapolations of where technology is going, happens outside the normal 9-5 workday. Centauri Dreams readers know that the Icarus team is composed of volunteers, most of whom work and exchange ideas over the Internet -- only a...

Talking about Mason Peck's notions of 'swarm' spacecraft -- probes on a chip that might reach interstellar speeds -- I'm inescapably drawn to the other end of the spectrum. A 'worldship' is a mighty creation that may mass in the millions of tons, a kilometer (or more) long vehicle that moves at a small fraction of the speed of light but can accommodate thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of inhabitants. What promises to be the first scientific conference devoted solely to worldships is about to take place on Lambeth Road in London at the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society. The day-long conference gets down to business on the morning of August 17. This BIS page offers a draft of the program. As the BIS has done in the past, all presentations from the conference will be written up in a special issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, where much of the early speculation on worldships has taken place. Several of the Project Icarus team will be...

The Tau Zero Foundation is pleased to announce that planet hunter extraordinaire Geoffrey Marcy is now affiliated with the organization. As a Tau zero practitioner, Dr. Marcy will serve as a major point of contact on exoplanet issues, bringing with him the most storied portfolio in the planet-hunting business. Working closely with Paul Butler and Debra Fischer, Dr. Marcy (University of California at Berkeley) has discovered more extrasolar planets than anyone else, including 70 out of the first 100 to be found. His team's findings include the first multiple-planet system, the first Saturn mass planets, and the first Neptune-mass planet. His awards are numerous: Shaw Prize in 2005, Discovery Magazine's Space Scientist of the Year in 2003, the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the Carl Sagan Award, the Beatrice Tinsley Prize, and the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. A warm welcome, Geoff! Centauri Dreams readers will recall our coverage of the...

Given the budgetary situation, it's nice to know we can still get to the outer Solar System without the cost of a flagship-class mission like Cassini, which weighed in at 3.26 billion -- that included $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle. Now Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) is moving forward on a much cheaper mission concept to reach Titan, one of the three proposals selected as candidates for an upcoming NASA Discovery Program mission. We're now down to three proposals for this mission out of an original 28 submitted last summer, with each team receiving $3 million to develop a still more detailed concept study. The Titan mission is just what the doctor ordered to perk up your ailing sense of wonder, intended to deliver a capsule called Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) that would land in and explore one of the large seas that Cassini has helped us map. The concept...

Discovery News now offers fully ten articles on Project Icarus and its background, written by the Icarus team and assembled on the site by Ian O'Neill. I was startled to realize how the list had grown, but it reminds me to point periodically to this collection, because Icarus -- the attempt to re-design the Project Daedalus starship study of the 1970s -- is a work very much in progress. Icarus is a joint project of the Tau Zero Foundation and the British Interplanetary Society. The latest article on the team's work is by physicist Andreas Tziolas, who in addition to being a frequent Centauri Dreams contributor is also secondary propulsion lead for the Icarus effort. It's no surprise that the biggest issue surrounding an interstellar probe is the propulsion system, which for Icarus means fusion, a method offering as much as a million times better performance than our current chemical rocket technologies, if we can ever figure out just how to harness it. The Icarus team chose fusion...

We have a long way to go before we can get a probe to another star in the space of a human lifetime. The figure always cited here is the heliocentric speed of Voyager 1, some 17.05 kilometers per second, which is faster than any of our outward bound spacecraft but would take well over 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, assuming Voyager 1 were pointed in that direction. New Horizons is currently making 15.73 kilometers per second on its way to a Pluto/Charon flyby in July of 2015, impressive but not the kind of speed that would get us to interstellar probe territory. Interestingly, the fastest spacecraft ever built weren't headed out of the Solar System at all, but in toward the Sun. The Helios probes were West German vehicles launched by NASA, one in 1974, the other in 1976, producing successful missions to study conditions close to the Sun for a period of over ten years. The orbits of these two craft were highly elliptical, and at closest approach to the Sun, each reached speeds...

by Andreas Tziolas After a 15 minute main thruster burn early this morning (UTC), the MESSENGER spacecraft is now in orbit around Mercury. Congratulations to the entire MESSENGER team. As we look forward to much more from Mercury, I want to turn today's session over to Andreas Tziolas, for some thoughts on the mind-bending process of designing an interstellar spacecraft. Dr. Tziolas is a theoretical physicist and spacecraft engineer, currently serving as the Deputy Project Leader of Project Icarus. In his recent PhD (2009), he explored cosmologies resulting from brane collisions in string theory. He is currently the chief scientist for Variance Dynamical, an electronics prototyping company in Anchorage, Alaska developing radiation hardened electronics for use in space exploration. In this article, Dr. Tziolas talks to us about the legend of Icarus and offers some personal reflections from his experience as a part of the inspirational Project Icarus design team. There have been many...

We rarely talk about the inner planets here, and even Mars gets short shrift. That's because I decided at the outset that because there were so many excellent sites covering planetary exploration -- and especially Mars -- my only focus within our Solar System would be on the outer planets and, of course, what lies beyond them. But the MESSENGER mission is simply too fascinating to ignore, the first mission to Mercury since Mariner 10 way back in 1974, and beyond that, one of its project scientists is a man I deeply respect, Ralph McNutt (JHU/APL), who in addition to his MESSENGER duties also serves as one of the consultants for the Project Icarus starship design. In fact, McNutt's work in regions both near and far from the Sun is voluminous. For MESSENGER, he will be analyzing the planet's surface composition using data from the spacecraft's X-Ray Spectrometer and Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer instruments. But he's also a co-investigator for the New Horizons mission to...

We spend a lot of time talking about how to get an interstellar probe up to speed. But what happens if we do achieve a cruise speed of 12 percent of the speed of light, as envisioned by the designers who put together Project Daedalus back in the 1970s? Daedalus called for a 3.8-year period of acceleration that would set up a 46-year cruise to its target, Barnard's Star, some 5.9 light years away. That's stretching mission duration out to the active career span of a researcher, but it's a span we might accept if we could be sure we'd get good science out of it. Maximizing the Science Return But can we? Let's assume we're approaching a solar system at 12 percent of c and out there orbiting the target star is a terrestrial planet, just the sort of thing we're hoping to find. Assume for the sake of argument that the probe crosses the path of this object at approximately ninety degrees to its orbital motion trajectory. As Kelvin Long shows in a recent post on the Project Icarus blog, the...

After all this time, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of massive objects in space as lenses, their distortion of spacetime offering the ability to see distant objects at huge magnification. On Friday we saw how the lensing effect caused by galactic clusters can be used to study dark energy. And consider the early results from the Herschel-ATLAS project, conducted by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory. Herschel is scanning large areas of the sky in far-infrared and sub-millimeter light. Many of its brightest sources turn out to be magnified by gravitational lenses, where light from a very distant object passes a galaxy much closer to the Earth, bending that light so that the image of the more distant galaxy is magnified and distorted. Because Herschel has only covered one-thirtieth of the entire Herschel-ATLAS survey area, it's likely that the project will uncover hundreds of gravitational lenses, offering astronomers the chance to probe galaxies in the early universe...

by Marc Millis When Pete Worden (NASA Ames) spoke to the Long Now Foundation recently, he surely didn't realize how much confusion his announcement of a '100-Year Starship' study would create. The news coverage has been all over the map and frequently incorrect, ranging from intimations of a coverup (Fox News) to mistaken linkages between the study and competely unrelated talk about one-way missions to Mars (the Telegraph and many other papers). What's really going on in this collaboration between NASA and DARPA? Marc Millis has some thoughts on that based on his own talks with the principals. Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau Zero Foundation, here puts some of the myths to rest and explains where the 100-Year Starship fits into our future. If you have not yet heard, there's been a bit of news flurry over the announcement that DARPA is funding NASA Ames to the tune of $1M for a one-year study for a "100-Year...

Project Icarus, introduced to the IAA at last year's Aosta conference, made quite a splash yesterday at the International Astronautical Congress in Prague, with four presentations by Icarus team members and related work on the FOCAL mission by Claudio Maccone. Icarus is the attempt to re-examine the Project Daedalus starship study of the 1970s in light of technological developments in the intervening years. A joint project between the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation, it's now in fully operational mode. Fueling Up a Starship There is much in these papers worth comment, but today I'll home in on the issue of helium-3 and where to find it, presented yesterday and drawing on the work of Andreas Hein, Andreas Tziolas and Adam Crowl. Daedalus was envisioned as a fusion mission using deuterium and helium-3 as fuel, a reaction that has advantages over deuterium/tritium but one that has yet to be demonstrated in a working reactor. Assuming we do figure out how to...

The International Astronautical Congress is in full swing in Prague today, with regular updates flowing over #IAC2010 on Twitter and the first session of interstellar import now in progress as I write this. It's a session on interstellar precursor missions that includes, in addition to Ralph McNutt (JHU/APL) on the impact of the Voyager and IBEX missions, a series of papers from the Project Icarus team ranging from helium-3 mining to communications via the gravitational lens of both the Sun and the target star (no specific target has yet been chosen for Icarus). Claudio Maccone will be summarizing where we stand with the FOCAL mission, envisioned as the first attempt to exploit gravitational lensing for astronomical observations. But I'll turn today to Marc Millis, who will wrap up the precursor session with a discussion of the first interstellar missions and their dependence on things we can measure, such as energy. The notion here is to look at the energy required for an...