Marc Millis, Tau Zero's founding architect, drawing on his experience with NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and the years of research since, offers us some ideas about impartiality and how scientists can hope to attain it. It's human nature to want our particular theories to succeed, but when they collide with reality, the lessons learned can open up interesting alternatives, as Marc explains in relation to interstellar worldships and the possibilities of exotic propulsion. by Marc G. Millis The best researchers I know seem to be able to maintain their impartiality when reaching new conclusions. The more common behavior is that people get an idea stuck in their head and then try and prove themselves correct. I just learned that there is a term for this more common behavior: "Polemical." Embedded in the word is the notion that controversial argument can turn aggressive, an inevitable result when people are defending what they consider their turf. I mention this in the...

Technology fails at the damnedest times, which is particularly ironic when discussing something as futuristic as a starship. But then, a starship launched in a hundred or more years won't be worrying about small cassette recorders like my little Olympus, which chewed up the tape on which I was recording the June 16 teleconference held by DARPA's David Neyland about the 100 Year Starship Study. Fortunately, I am a wizard at note-taking by hand, which comes from my love of fountain pens (I collect and repair vintage instruments) and enjoyment of script on a yellow legal pad. I always take notes by hand as well as taping where possible, a good thing because I didn't realize what had happened to the tape until after the teleconference had ended. Neyland, who is director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, is an engaging man with a bit of a penchant for science fiction -- he mentioned Heinlein as an inspiration, but also gave credit to Jules Verne. After all, it was all the way back in...

We're keeping a close eye on the 100 Year Starship Study, and with the call for papers for its upcoming conference just issued, I want to run this verbatim. Addendum: The DARPA teleconference for the 100 Year Starship Study ended about 1215 EST. I'm compiling my notes and should have something up about it either later this afternoon or tomorrow. DARPA Encourages Individuals and Organizations to Look to the Stars; Issues Call for Papers for 100 Year Starship Study Public Symposium In 1865, Jules Verne put forward a seemingly impossible notion in From Earth to the Moon: he wrote about building a giant space gun that would rocket men to the moon. Just over a century later, the impossible became reality when Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon's surface in 1969. A century can fundamentally change our understanding of our universe and reality. Man's desire to explore space and achieve the seemingly impossible is at the center of the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium. The...

The 100 Year Starship Study being developed through DARPA and NASA Ames now has its Web site up, from which the following: DARPA and NASA are jointly planning the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium that will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 in Orlando, FL. The goal of the symposium is to promote discussions that will bring us closer to standing up an organization that can shepherd efforts to help achieve interstellar flight in the next century. The symposium is expected to attract roughly 2,000 people from throughout the United States as well as from foreign countries. The public symposium is a follow up to the January Strategic Planning Workshop. In addition to keynote and plenary sessions, the symposium will have a set of seven tracks built around the following topics: Time-Distance Solutions Education, Social, Economic Legal Considerations and Philosophical and Religious Considerations Biology and Space Medicine Habitats and Environmental Science Destinations...

Today we continue with responses to the Request for Information from the 100 Year Starship study. Kelvin Long is senior designer and co-founder of Project Icarus, the ambitious attempt to design a fusion starship. A joint project of the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation, Project Icarus takes its inspiration from the original Project Daedalus, updating and extending it with new thinking and new technologies. Here Kelvin considers how a research organization tasked with developing something as ambitious as a starship can function and prosper. And he would have considerable insight into the matter -- as a Project Icarus consultant, I’ve never seen so dedicated and energetic a team as the one he put together. Its final report will be an essential work in interstellar propulsion studies. Kelvin Long completed his Bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering and Masters degree in Astrophysics at Queen Mary College, University of London. He is a Fellow of The British...

by Marc Millis “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a study to inspire the first steps in the next era of space exploration—a journey between the stars.” So reads the Request for Information document (RFI) that DARPA released recently, seeking ideas for organization, business model and approach for a self-sustaining investment vehicle to study these matters. Note that word ‘study,’ because what DARPA talks about in its recent RFI is this: “The 100 Year StarshipTM Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible.” We’ve talked about the 100 Year Starship study before, particularly in Marc Millis’ article on his participation at the first meeting held to discuss the idea. Now Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and founding architect of the Tau...

Working on a book on interstellar flight in 2002, I came across a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society with a bold title: "A Programme for Interstellar Exploration." I already knew that its author, Robert Forward, was a major figure in the world of deep space studies, an aerospace engineer and inventor with a deep knowledge of physics as well as a popular science fiction author, in whose stories many of his futuristic ideas were played out. What I didn't know until I read the paper was that this man had proposed a step-by-step plan for reaching the stars way back in 1975 at a meeting at the U.S. House of Representatives. These were bold years for interstellar thinking, as witness Forward's appearance before the Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications that year. Forward developed a fifty-year plan for interstellar exploration that, in his words, 'envisions the launch of automated interstellar probes to nearby stellar systems around the turn of the century,...

Last week turned into a major disruption for Centauri Dreams. Major server problems that have involved new hardware and all manner of delays struck late on the night of Sunday February 27 and kept the site offline until this past weekend. Sorry for this, and thanks to those of you who kept in touch via email or via the @centauri_dreams Twitter feed. Let's hope the situation is now under control. In any case, it's time to get back to work, which I'll begin with this piece on the return of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. On my desk is a large black mug, too big for coffee despite the copious amounts of coffee I consume -- I've got it loaded with pens, yellow markers and the like. I take special pleasure in seeing it every day because it has a bold NIAC logo on it -- NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts -- blue and white on a black background, and on the other side is a favorite phrase of Bob Cassanova's: "Don't let your preoccupation with reality stifle your imagination." At...

Back when I was first thinking about writing a book on interstellar flight, my reading began with Adrian Berry's fine study The Giant Leap: Mankind Heads for the Stars. A science writer and novelist, Berry was science correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1977 to 1997, and is now the paper's Consulting Editor (Science). The Giant Leap ranged through the various propulsion options and explained the history of the interstellar idea, but I found it more inspiring still in its expression of human motivations and the urge to explore. Looking at our human history of migration and exploration, Berry liked in particular the parallel between the settlement of the Polynesian islands and our future among the stars: It is the 'radiative' nature of the Polynesian voyages that provides the closest parallel to interstellar travel. It was all made possible by that forerunner of a starship, the double canoe. Imagine twin hulls about nine metres in length, covered by a single deck and a lateen...

The Exoplanetology site is developing a tool for those in need of quick exoplanet information. The Exoplanet Seeker is an interface that will make it easy to query various exoplanet databases, including the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, NASA's PlanetQuest New Worlds Atlas, the Exoplanet.org site and other sources like the Wikipedia and SIMBAD. Each of these sites has its own strengths, from light curves to graphical charts, so bringing them together will be helpful once early bugs in the interface (producing frequent failed queries) are resolved. From tools on the Net to tools in space, it's always interesting to speculate on what's in the pipeline. Maybe 'pipeline' is too strong a word, though, because tools like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have to be approved by NASA, which is willing to consider an earlier version of the instrument it rejected but can offer no promise of success. Nonetheless, the results from CoRoT and the early detections of Kepler (not to...

Caleb Scharf is director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center and author of a new book I intended to mention in Saturday's Notes & Queries section before running out of time. I want to be sure to insert it now, because if you're getting serious about the study of astrobiology, you'll want to know about this title. Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology (University Science Books, 2008) is designed for university courses on the subject, with extensive background not only in the relevant physics and mathematics, but also in chemistry, biology and geophysics, studies the multi-faceted world of astrobiology melds into a complex whole. The book is actually based on the upper-level course Scharf has been teaching at Columbia. The author tells me in an e-mail that his intent is specifically to reach students serious about moving into the discipline: "The aim is to provide the basis for students to gain a real understanding of how to actually do research on exoplanets, as well as some of the...

Few places on Earth please me more than the Scottish highlands, to the point that I used to daydream about moving to Inverness (this was before that city's population explosion, back when it weighed in at a sedate 50,000 inhabitants). But I'll take anywhere in Scotland, and when I realized I wouldn't be able to make the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow this time around, I found myself sinking into a multi-day funk. Fortunately all is not lost, as the IAC, organized this year by the British Interplanetary Society, has left a digital record behind. The Web is second best to being there, to be sure, but it helps to be able to listen in on key talks. I'll leave you to page through the images and video from the event, pleased to note that Kelvin Long's highlight lecture Fusion, Antimatter & The Space Drive is available in its entirety. Interstellar advocate Long is a member of the BIS as well as an active player in the Tau Zero Foundation. If you can set aside 45 minutes or...

I'm a great believer in the open courseware concept that MIT has done so much to promote. The idea is to do away with the password-protected gatekeeper function that so many university and college Web sites impose, opening access to those course materials an instructor chooses to put online. Some 1800 courses in 33 different disciplines have made their way to the Web via MIT's gateway, their offerings ranging from audio of lectures, lecture notes and exams to PDFs and video files. It's a pleasure to see that Bruce Irving is tracking MIT's venture on his Music of the Spheres site, a post I've chosen to highlight from this week's Carnival of Space collection. Bruce notes one recent addition to the MIT catalog, a course called Space Systems Engineering that looks at design challenges in both ground and space-based telescopes, ultimately attempting to choose the top-rated architectures for a lunar telescope facility. But the MIT offerings are wide ranging. I'm seeing courses on aerospace...

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has now announced that its operations will cease on August 31st of this year. Director Robert Cassanova takes justifiable pride in the Institute's accomplishments, and I want to quote from the letter he and associate director Diana Jennings posted on the NIAC site the other day: Since its beginning in February 1998, NIAC has encouraged an atmosphere of creative examination of seemingly impossible aerospace missions and of audacious, but credible, visions to extend the limits of technical achievement. Visionary thinking is an essential ingredient for maintaining global leadership in the sciences, technology innovation and expansion of knowledge. NIAC has sought creative researchers who have the ability to transcend current perceptions of scientific knowledge and, with imagination and vision, to leap beyond incremental development towards the possibilities of dramatic breakthroughs in performance of aerospace systems. A key fact that many people...