Power beaming to accelerate a ‘lightsail’ has been pondered since the days when Robert Forward became intrigued with nascent laser technologies. The Breakthrough Starshot concept has been to use a laser array to drive a fleet of tiny payloads to a nearby star, most likely Proxima Centauri. It’s significant that a crucial early decision was to place the laser array that would drive such craft on the Earth’s surface rather than in space. You would think that a space-based installation would have powerful advantages, but two immediate issues drove the choice, the first being political. The politics of laser beaming can be complicated. I’m reminded of the obligations involved in what is known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (let’s just call it the Outer Space Treaty), spurred by a paper from Adam Hibberd that has just popped up on arXiv. The treaty, which comes out of...

The solar wind is ever enticing, providing as it does a highly variable stream of charged particles moving out from the Sun at speeds up to 800 kilometers per second. Finding ways to harness that energy for propulsive purposes is tricky, although a good deal of work has gone into designs like magsails, where a loop of superconducting wire creates the magnetic field needed to interact with this ‘wind.’ But given its ragged variability, the sail metaphor makes us imagine a ship constantly pummeled by gusts in varying degrees of intensity, constantly adjusting sail to maintain course and stability. And it's hard to keep the metaphor working when we factor in solar flares or coronal mass ejections. We can lose the superconducting loop if we create a plasma cloud of charged particles around the craft for the same purpose. Or maybe we can use an electric ‘sail,’ enabled by long tethers that deflect solar wind ions. All of these ideas cope with a solar wind that, near the Sun, may be moving...

Browsing through the correspondence that makes up Freeman Dyson’s wonderful Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (Liveright, 2018), I came across this missive, describing to his parents in 1958 why space exploration occupied his time at General Atomic, where he was working on Orion, the nuclear pulse concept that would explode atomic devices behind huge pusher plates to produce thrust. Dyson had no doubts about the value of humanity moving ever outward as it matured: I am something of a fanatic on this subject. You might as well ask Columbus why he wasted his time discovering America when he could have been improving the methods of Spanish sheep farming. I think the parallel is a close one… We shall know what we go to Mars for only after we get there. The study of whatever forms of life exist on Mars is likely to lead to better understanding of life in general. This may well be of more benefit to humanity than irrigating ten Saharas. But that is only one of many...

If you look at Galaxy’s December, 1962 issue, which I have in front of me from my collection of old SF magazines, you’ll find a name that appears only once in the annals of science fiction publishing: George Peterson Field. The article, “Pluto - Doorway to the Stars,” is actually by Robert Forward, who was at that time indulging in a time-honored practice, concealing an appearance in a science fiction venue so as not to raise any eyebrows with management at his day job at Hughes Aircraft Company. Aeronautical engineer Carl Wiley had done the same thing with an article on solar sails in Astounding back in May of 1951, choosing the pseudonym Russell Saunders as cover for his work at Goodyear Aircraft Corporation (later Lockheed Martin). Both these articles were significant, as they introduced propulsion concepts for deep space to a popular audience outside the scientific journals. While solar sails had been discussed by the likes of J. D. Bernal and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the idea of...

Although solar sails were making their way into the aerospace journals in the late 1950s, Robert Forward was the first scientist to consider using laser beams rather than sunlight to drive a space sail. That concept, which György Marx picked up on in his 1966 paper, opened the door to interstellar mission concepts. Late in life in an unpublished memoir, Forward recalled reading about Theodore Maiman’s work on lasers at Hughes Research Laboratories, and realizing that this was a way to create a starship. His 1962 article (citation below) laid out the idea for the journal Missiles and Rockets and was later reprinted in Science Digest. Marx surely knew the Forward article and his subsequent paper in Nature probed how to achieve this goal. Image: One of the great figures of interstellar studies, Robert Forward among many other things introduced and explored the principles of beamed propulsion. Credit: UAH Library Robert L. Forward Collection. Marx was at that time a professor of...

In search of ever-higher velocities leaving the Solar System, we need to keep in mind the options offered by the solar wind. This stream of charged plasma particles flowing outward from the Sun carves out the protective bubble of the heliosphere, and in doing so can generate ‘winds’ of more than 500 kilometers per second. Not bad if we’re thinking in terms of harnessing the effect, perhaps by a magnetic sail that can create the field needed to interact with the wind, or an electric sail whose myriad tethers, held taut by rotation, create an electric field that repels protons and produces thrust. But like the winds that drove the great age of sail on Earth, the solar version is treacherous, as likely to becalm the ship as to cause its sails to billow. It’s a gusty, turbulent medium, one where those velocities of 500 kilometers and more per second can as likely fall well below that figure. Exactly how it produces squalls in the form of coronal mass ejections or calmer flows is a topic...

How long before we can send humans to another star system? Ask people active in the interstellar community and you’ll get answers ranging from ‘at least a century’ to ‘never.’ I’m inclined toward a view nudging into the ‘never’ camp but not quite getting there. In other words, I think the advantages of highly intelligent instrumented payloads will always be apparent for missions of this duration, but I know human nature well enough to believe that somehow, sometime, a few hardy adventurers will find a way to make the journey. I do doubt that it will ever become commonplace. You may well disagree, and I hope you’re right, as the scenarios open to humans with a galaxy stuffed with planets to experience are stunning. Having come into the field steeped in the papers and books of Robert Forward, I’ve always been partial to sail technologies and love the brazen, crazy extrapolation of Forward’s “Flight of the Dragonfly,” which appeared in Analog in 1982 and which would later be turned into...

Reaching ‘Oumuamua through some kind of statite technology, an idea we’ve been kicking around recently, brings up the interesting work of Richard Linares at MIT, who has been working on a “dynamic orbital slingshot” for rendezvous with future objects from the interstellar depths (ISOs). Linares received a Phase I grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program to pursue the idea of a network of statites on sentry duty, any one of which could release the stored energy of the sail to enter a trajectory that would take it to a flyby of an object entering our system on a hyperbolic orbit. The concept is simplicity itself, once you realize that a statite balances the pressure of solar photons against the Sun’s gravitational pull, and essentially hovers in place. As I mentioned when covering Greg Matloff and Les Johnson’s paper on using statites to achieve fast rectilinear trajectories to reach interstellar interlopers, Robert Forward was the one who came up with the idea...

What an interesting object Methone is. Discovered by the Cassini imaging team in 2004 along with the nearby Pallene, this moon of Saturn is a scant 1.6 kilometers in radius, orbiting between Mimas and Enceladus. In fact, Methone, Pallene and another moon called Anthe all orbit at similar distances from Saturn and are dynamically jostled by Mimas. What stands out about Methone is first of all its shape and, perhaps even more strikingly, the smoothness of its surface. We’d like to know what produces this kind of object and would also like to retrieve imagery of both Pallene and Anthe. If something this strange has equally odd companions, is there something about its relationship with both nearby moons and Saturn’s rings that can produce this kind of surface? Image: It's difficult not to think of an egg when looking at Saturn's moon Methone, seen here during a Cassini flyby of the small moon. The relatively smooth surface adds to the effect created by the oblong shape....

Take a look at the image below. It’s a jet coming off the quasar 3C273. I call your attention to the length of this jet, some 100,000 light years, which is roughly the distance across the Milky Way. Jeff Greason pointed out at the Montreal symposium of the Interstellar Research Group that images like this suggest it may be possible for humans to produce ‘pinched’ relativistic electron jets over the much smaller distances needed to propel a spacecraft out of the Solar System. This is an intriguing image if you’re interested in high-energy beams pushing payloads to nearby stars. Greason is a self-described ‘serial entrepreneur,’ the holder of some 29 patents and chief technologist of Electric Sky, which is all about beaming energy to craft much closer to home. But he moonlights as chairman of the Tau Zero Foundation and is a well known figure in interstellar studies. Placing beaming into context is a useful exercise, as it suggests alternative ways to generate and use a beam. In all of...

Breakthrough Starshot’s concept for a flyby of Alpha Centauri would reach its destination in a single human generation. We’ve discussed sail materials in the last couple of posts, but let’s step back to the overview. Using a powerful ground-based laser, we illuminate a sail on the forward side of which are embedded instruments for communications, imaging and whatever we choose to carry. We need a sail that is roughly 4 meters by 4 meters, and one that weighs no more than a single gram. As Richard Norte pointed out to the Interstellar Research Group’s Montreal symposium (video here), a US penny weighs 2.5 grams, which gives an idea what we are up against. We need a payload at gram-scale and a sail that is itself no more than a gram. Obviously our sail must be of nanoscale thickness, and able to take a beating, for we’re going to light it up for 10 minutes with that laser beam to drive it to 20 percent of lightspeed. We’re engineering, then, in the realm of nanotechnology, but working...

The science fiction trope that often comes to mind in conjunction with the interstellar ark idea is of the crew that has lost all sense of the mission. Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop (1958), published in the US as Starship, is a classic case of a generation ship that has become the entire world. The US title, of course, gave away the whole plot, which is sort of ridiculous. Have a look at the British cover, which leaves the setting mysterious for most of the book, and the American one, which blatantly tells you what’s going on. I wonder what Aldiss thought of this. Be that as it may, interstellar arks are conceived as having large crews and taking a lot of time to move between stars, usually on the order of thousands of years. We can trace the concept in the scientific literature back to Les Shepherd’s famous 1952 paper on human interstellar travel, a key paper in the evolution of the field. An interesting adaptation of the paper appeared in Science Fiction Plus in April of the following...

A material called aerographite offers options for solar sails that transcend the capabilities of both beryllium and graphene, the latter being the most recent candidate for fast sail missions outside the Solar System. Developed at the Technical University of Hamburg and refined by researchers at the University of Kiel, aerographite came to the attention of the interstellar community in 2020 thanks to a groundbreaking paper by René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen), working with co-authors Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Institut de Ciencies Espacials, Barcelona), Michael Hippke (Sonneberg Observatory, Germany) and Pierre Kervella (Observatoire de Paris). I’ve written about aerographite before, in Aerographite: An Advance in Sail Materials with Deep Space Implications and Solar Sails: Deeper into the Aerographite Option, both of which are in the archives along with several other posts on the subject. But here I need to pause for a brief administrative moment:...

One of the great problems of lightsail concepts for interstellar flight is the need to decelerate. Here I’m using lightsail as opposed to ‘solar sail’ in the emerging consensus that a solar sail is one that reflects light from our star, and is thus usable within the Solar System out to about 5 AU, where we deal with the diminishment of photon pressure with distance. Or we could use the Sun with a close solar pass to sling a solar sail outbound on an interstellar trajectory, acknowledging that once our trajectory has been altered and cruise velocity obtained, we might as well stow the now useless sail. Perhaps we could use it for shielding in the interstellar medium or some such. A lightsail in today’s parlance defines a sail that is assumed to work with a beamed power source, as with the laser array envisioned by Breakthrough Starshot. With such an array, whether on Earth or in space, we can forgo the perihelion pass and simply bring our beam to bear on the sail, reaching much higher...

Letting the imagination roam has philosophical as well as practical benefits. From the interstellar perspective, consider the Daedalus starship, designed with loving detail by members of the British Interplanetary Society in the 1970s. The mammoth (54,000 ton) vehicle was never conceived as remotely feasible at our stage of technology. But ‘our stage of technology’ is exactly the point the project illustrated. Daedalus demonstrated that there was nothing in physical law to prevent the construction of a starship. The question was, when would we reach the level of building it? For as Robert Forward frequently pointed out, interstellar flight could no longer be considered impossible. We can’t know the answer to the question, but recall that before Daedalus, there was a lot of ‘informed’ opinion that interstellar flight was a chimera, and that all species were necessarily restricted to their home systems. Daedalus made the point debatable. If a civilization had a thousand year jump on us...

The game changer for space exploration in coming decades will be self-assembly, enabling the growth of a new and invigorating paradigm in which multiple smallsat sailcraft launched as ‘rideshare’ payloads augment huge ‘flagship’ missions. Self-assembly allows formation-flying smallsats to emerge enroute as larger, fully capable craft carrying complex payloads to target. The case for this grows out of Slava Turyshev and team’s work at JPL as they refine the conceptual design for a mission to the solar gravitational lens at 550 AU and beyond. The advantages are patent, including lower cost, fast transit times and full capability at destination. Aspects of this paradigm are beginning to be explored in the literature, as I’ve been reminded by Alex Tolley, who forwarded an interesting paper out of the University of Padua (Italy). Drawing on an international team, lead author Giovanni Santi explores the use of CubeSat-scale spacecraft driven by sail technologies, in this case ‘lightsails’...

‘LightCraft’ is the term used by Slava Turyshev’s team at JPL and elsewhere to identify the current design of the ambitious mission we looked at briefly in the previous post. This is a Technology Demonstrator Mission (TDM), which can be considered a precursor to what may become a mission to the solar gravitational lens. The mission concept is under active investigation, partly via a Phase III grant from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts office. Reaching the focal region (for practical purposes, beyond 600 AU) in less than 25 years requires changes to our thinking in propulsion, not to mention payload size and the potential of robotic self-assembly en-route. Hence the paper the researchers have just released, “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” which makes the case for leveraging our growing expertise in solar sail design and the highly successful move toward miniaturization in space systems, which the authors believe can be extended to include smallsats operating...

We need to get to the ice giants. We have limited enough experience with our system’s larger gas giants, although orbital operations at both Jupiter and Saturn have been highly successful. But about the ice giants, their formation, their interiors, their moons (and even the possibility of internal oceans on these objects), we draw on only a single mission, Voyager II. Which is why the April 2022 decadal study (“Origins, Worlds, and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology 2023-2032”) recommended a Uranus mission, complete with orbiter, to be launched in the late 2030s. Can we do this under our existing paradigm for space exploration? A new paper titled “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” written by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Slava Turyshev and co-authored by major proponents of solar sail technologies, makes the case for coupling our abundant advances in miniaturization with our growing experience in solar sails to achieve missions at...

Knowing of Grover Swartzlander’s pioneering work on diffractive solar sails, I was not surprised to learn that Amber Dubill, who now takes the idea into a Phase III study for NIAC, worked under Swartzlander at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Diffractive Solar Sailing project involves an infusion of $2 million over the next two years, with Dubill (JHU/APL) heading up a team that includes experts in traditional solar sailing as well as optics and metamaterials. A potential mission to place sails into a polar orbit around the Sun is one possible outcome. [Addendum: The original article stated that the Phase III award was for $3 million. The correct amount is $2 million, as changed above]. But let’s fall back to that phrase ‘traditional solar sailing,’ which made me wince even as I wrote it. Solar sailing relies on the fact that while solar photons have no mass, they do impart momentum, enough to nudge a sail with a force that over time results in useful acceleration. Among...

Not long ago we looked at Greg Matloff’s paper on von Neumann probes, which made the case that even if self-reproducing probes were sent out only once every half million years (when a close stellar encounter occurs), there would be close to 70 billion systems occupied by such probes within a scant 18 million years. Matloff now considers interstellar migration in a different direction in a new paper addressing how M-dwarf civilizations might expand, and why electric sails could be their method. It’s an intriguing notion because M-dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars in the galaxy, and if we learn that they can support life, they might house vast numbers of civilizations with the capability of sending out interstellar craft. They’re also crippled in terms of electromagnetic flux when it comes to conventional solar sails, which is why the electric sail comes into play as a possible alternative, here analyzed in terms of feasibility and performance and its prospects for enabling...