Yesterday's post looked at the question of starship detection. But the paper by Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson that I discussed actually focused on a highly specific subset of such observations, the case of an artificial object moving at such high gamma factors that the ship's velocity was over 99 percent of the speed of light. It may be that such things become possible to sufficiently advanced civilizations, but if they do and we observe them, we will be doing something akin to what Richard Carrigan does when he looks for Dyson spheres. Hunting a relativistic starship between galaxies is a kind of interstellar archaeology. What I mean is that if any of the researchers now looking for observational data of advanced civilizations turn something up in, say, M31, that construct will be so far away from us in both space and time that we might well be studying the ruins of an ancient culture. I made this case not long ago in an essay called Distant Ruins for Aeon magazine. This is a...

The news that The Planetary Society is readying the first of its Lightsail spacecraft for a May launch stirs memories of Cordwainer Smith (Paul Linebarger) and mainframe computers. Smith wrote his haunting science fiction in the days when computers filled entire rooms, and the pilot who flies a solar sail thousands of kilometers wide in "The Lady Who Sailed the Soul" is there because, as a technician tells her, "...a sailor takes a lot less weight than a machine. There is no all-purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do. You go simply because you are expendable." Despite the anachronisms, Smith's short stories (collected in The Rediscovery of Man) are as mesmerizing as ever. As computers were big in those days, so have been our sail designs, from Smith's behemoth (towing 26,000 adiabatic pods containing frozen human settlers) to Robert Forward's beamed-laser sails. Given the need for harnessing the momentum of photons, all this makes sense,...

Over the years we've looked at magnetic sail (magsail) concepts of various kinds and discussed whether a spacecraft could do such things as 'riding' the solar wind to high velocities, or use a stellar wind to brake against as it entered a destination solar system. But just how workable is the magsail? In a 2007 paper called "Theory of Space Magnetic Sail Some Common Mistakes and Electrostatic MagSail" now available on the arXiv site, Alexander Bolonkin argues that magsail concepts are unworkable because induced fields resulting from two-way interactions between the solar wind and the craft's magsail disrupt the previously calculated effect. In fact, Bolonkin believes that previous work on the matter is seriously compromised, as he said upfront in the abstract of his paper: The first reports on the "Space Magnetic Sail" concept appeared more [than] 30 years ago. During the period since some hundreds of research and scientific works have been published, including hundreds of research...

On Monday I touched on the topic of multi-modal spacecraft, wondering whether future deep space missions might carry twin or even triple systems of propulsion. The example I want to tinker with is an interstellar craft driven by beamed energy, akin to some of Robert Forward's designs in the 1980s. Forward went through enormous challenges trying to decelerate at the destination, though as we'll see, he did come up with more than one solution. A beamed laser sailcraft runs into this problem because the power source is in a close solar orbit, while the craft is reaching speeds that make a human crossing to another star possible. How to slow it down from behind? Deceleration is going to take a long time no matter what the method, but if we factor in a second mode of propulsion, a magnetic sail, we can brake against the destination star's stellar wind. I mentioned on Monday as well that the Venture Star, the starship that got James Cameron's crew to Alpha Centauri in the film Avatar, was...

When Les Johnson spoke to a session on sail technologies at the 100 Year Starship symposium in Houston last September, he startled some in the audience by going through a list of how many solar sail missions are now in the works. The European Space Agency's Gossamer program accounts for one of these, which is already built and waiting for launch, but three are in the pipeline. The University of Surrey (UK) is a surprisingly active entrant, with three CubeSat sails set for flight in the next three years. We also have the Planetary Society's LightSail to contend with, a CubeSat design with a 32 square meter sail when deployed. There are other missions as well, with names like NEA [Near Earth Asteroid] Scout, Lunar Flashlight, and although it is now in limbo at least for several years, NASA's Sunjammer. The surge in interest in CubeSats is hard to miss here. They're cheap, small, and ideal for trying out sail experiments as we try to figure out how best to use this technology in space....

Although we can trace the growth of research into interstellar flight all the way back to the days of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the effort has often operated outside of government channels. Scientists and engineers whose day job might take in aspects of rocketry were hard pressed to find time for studying trips to the stars when the proximate needs were better communications satellites or improved designs for reaching low Earth orbit. Nonetheless, work continued, marked by the enthusiasm of the practitioners for what was clearly the ultimate mission. Official or unofficial, small groups hammering on ideas have continued to debate the core concepts. When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena turned Aden and Marjorie Meinel loose on a mission concept aimed at reaching 1000 AU back in the 1970s, the duo looked at two propulsion options. As the new edition of Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel (Copernicus, 2014) points out, the first of these was a nuclear-electric...

It was back in 2008 that Copernicus Books published an excellent introduction and reference to space sail technologies. Now the work of Gregory Matloff, Giovanni Vulpetti and Les Johnson, Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel is about to be released in a new edition that I've been reviewing for the past month (Note: the 2nd edition is not yet up on the book sites, but publication is slated for later in November). The new version preserves the older edition's structure but inserts three new chapters covering recent developments, one of which -- the cancellation of the Sunjammer sail mission -- is too current to have made it into the text. [Addendum: My mistake! Although the text I saw didn't have the Sunjammer news, Les Johnson tells me that the authors were able to insert it into the final version]. So let's start with that to get up to speed, and then I want to use Solar Sails as a guide through a series of posts covering not just sails themselves, their variants...

India can take great pride in the successful insertion of its Mangalyaan Mars probe into orbit around the red planet. At a cost of $75 million, the spacecraft is a bargain -- Maven, which entered Mars orbit on Sunday, cost almost ten times as much. In an Associated Press story this morning, I noticed that B. N. Raghunandan (Indian Institute of Science) said that every time India launches another rocket, he is besieged with students asking how they can enter his school's aerospace program. It's the same effect I was talking about yesterday, in which inspirational achievements drive cultural perceptions and influence careers. Meanwhile, I want to tackle solar sails this morning, prompted by Les Johnson's presentation at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston last week. What caught my attention here was the positive news Les had to share about what's ahead in the pipeline. But to put it into context, let's think about what has already flown in space. The Russian 'sail mirror'...

Our recent discussion of deep space magsails propelled by neutral particle beams inspired a lot of comments and a round of comment response from author Jim Benford. For those just joining us, Benford had studied a magsail concept developed by Alan Mole and discussed by Dana Andrews, with findings that questioned whether interstellar applications were possible, though in-system work appeared to be. The key issue was the divergence of the beam, sharply reducing its effectiveness at the sail. Today we'll wrap up the particle beam sail story for now, with Jim's thoughts on the latest round of comments. The full paper on this work is headed for one of the journals for peer review there and eventual publication. I'll be revisiting particle beam propulsion this fall, and of course the comments on the current articles remain open. by James Benford Eric Hughes wrote in the comments that my work had shown only that one method of neutralizing the neutral particle beam would produce divergence....

Andreas Hein is a familiar figure in these pages, having written on the subject of worldships as well as the uploading of consciousness. He is Deputy Director of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), as well as Director of its Technical Research Committee. He founded and leads Icarus Interstellar's Project Hyperion: A design study on manned interstellar flight. Andreas received his master's degree in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Munich and is now working on a PhD there in the area of space systems engineering, having conducted part of his research at MIT. He spent a semester abroad at the Institut Superieur de l'Aeronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse and also worked at the European Space Agency Strategy and Architecture Office on future manned space exploration. Today's essay introduces the Initiative for Interstellar Studies' Project Dragonfly Design Competition. by Andreas Hein 2089, 5th April: A blurry image rushes over screens around the...

Magnetic sails -- 'magsails' -- are a relative newcomer on the interstellar propulsion scene, having been first analyzed by Dana Andrews and Robert Zubrin in 1988. We saw that the particle beam concept advanced by Alan Mole and discussed this week by Jim Benford would use a magsail in which the payload and spacecraft were encircled by a superconducting loop 270 meters in diameter. The idea is to use the magnetic field to interact with the particle beam fired from an installation in the Solar System toward the departing interstellar craft. Within our own system, we can also take advantage of the solar wind, the plasma stream flowing outward from the Sun at velocities as high as 600 kilometers per second. A spacecraft attempting to catch this wind runs into the problem that sunlight contains far more momentum, which means a magnetic sail has to deflect a lot more of the solar wind than a solar sail needs to deflect sunlight. A physical sail, though, is more massive than a spacecraft...

Jim Benford's article on particle beam propulsion, published here last Friday and discussed in the days since, draws from the paper he will soon be submitting to one of the journals. I like the process: By running through the ideas here, we can see how they play before this scientifically literate audience, with responses that Jim can use in tweaking the final draft of the paper. Particle beam propulsion raises many issues, not surprising given the disagreements among the few papers that have tackled the subject. Are there ways of keeping the beam spread low that we haven't thought of yet? Does a particle beam require shielding for the payload? Does interplanetary particle beam work require a fully built infrastructure in the Solar System? We have much to consider as the analysis of this interesting propulsion concept continues. Dr. Benford is President of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California, which deals with high power microwave systems from conceptual designs to hardware....

Jim Benford's work on particle beam propulsion concepts, and in particular on the recent proposal by Alan Mole for a 1 kg beam-driven interstellar probe, has demonstrated the problem with using neutral particle beams for interstellar work. What we would like to do is to use a large super-conductor loop (Mole envisions a loop 270 meters in diameter) to create a magnetic field that will interact with the particle beam being fired at it. Benford's numbers show that significant divergence of the beam is unavoidable, no matter what technology we bring to bear. That means that the particle stream being fired at the receding starship is grossly inefficient. In the case of Mole's proposal, the beam size will reach 411 kilometers by the end of the acceleration period. We have only a fraction of the beam actually striking the spacecraft. This is an important finding and one that has not been anticipated in the earlier literature. In fact, Geoffrey Landis' 2004 paper "Interstellar Flight by...

We saw on Friday through Jim Benford's work that pushing a large sail with a neutral particle beam is a promising way to get around the Solar System, although it presents difficulties for interstellar work. Benford was analyzing an earlier paper by Alan Mole, which had in turn drawn on issues Dana Andrews raised about beamed sails. Benford saw that the trick is to keep a neutral particle beam from diverging so that the spot size of the beam quickly becomes much larger than the diameter of the sail. By his calculations, only a fraction of the particle beam Mole envisaged would actually strike the sail, and even laser cooling methods were ineffective at preventing this. It seems a good time to look back at Geoffrey Landis' paper on particle beam propulsion. I'm hoping to discuss some of these ideas with him at the upcoming Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop sessions in Oak Ridge, given that Jim Benford will also be there. The paper is "Interstellar Flight by Particle Beam"...

Is it possible to use a particle beam to push a sail to interstellar velocities? Back in the spring I looked at aerospace engineer Alan Mole’s ideas on the subject (see Interstellar Probe: The 1 KG Mission and the posts immediately following). Mole had described a one-kilogram interstellar payload delivered by particle beam in a paper in JBIS, and told Centauri Dreams that he was looking for an expert to produce cost estimates for the necessary beam generator. Jim Benford, CEO of Microwave Sciences, took up the challenge, with results that call interstellar missions into doubt while highlighting what may become a robust interplanetary technology. Benford's analysis, to be submitted in somewhat different form to JBIS, follows. by James Benford Alan Mole and Dana Andrews have described light interstellar probes accelerated by a neutral particle beam. I’ve looked into whether that particle beam can be generated with the required properties. I find that unavoidable beam divergence,...

Just how we follow up on the investigations of New Horizons remains an open question. But we need to be thinking about how we can push past the outer planets to continue our study of the heliopause and the larger interstellar environment in which the Sun moves. I notice that Bruce Wiegmann, writing a precis of a mission concept called the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS) has drawn inspiration from the Heliophysics Decadal Survey, which cites the need for in situ measurements of the outer heliosphere and beyond. It's good to see a bit more momentum building for continuing the grand voyages of exploration exemplified by the Pioneers, the Voyagers and New Horizons. I often cite the Innovative Interstellar Explorer concept developed at Johns Hopkins (APL), which targets nearby interstellar space at a distance of over 200 AU, but whether we're talking about IIE or Claudio Maccone's FOCAL mission or any other design aimed at exiting the Solar System, the key problem is...

Last week we looked at Mason Peck's ideas on 'Sprites,' tiny spacecraft the size of computer chips that could be sent in swarms to targets near and far. I was particularly interested in Peck's idea of using Jupiter as a massive particle accelerator, bringing huge numbers of Sprites up to speeds in the range of hundreds of kilometers per second. Growing out of Clifford Singer's insights in the 1970s and given onboard intelligence by Gerald Nordley, the idea of 'smart pellets' thus moves beyond a propulsion method to become a fleet of networked space probes. Perhaps one day we'll be able to use the tools of nanotechnology to create highly intelligent vehicles of extremely small size, rendering the propulsion problem a bit more tractable. But until we're at that level, it's fascinating to see the groundwork being laid in work like Peck's. Today I want to talk about another experiment with space vehicles that are smaller than a compact disc and as thin as a piece of paper. Pocket...

When Clifford Singer proposed in his 1980 paper that a stream of pellets could be used to drive an interstellar vehicle, the idea emerged at a time when Robert Forward had already drawn attention to a different kind of beamed propulsion. Forward's sail missions used a beamed laser from an array near the Sun, and he explored the possibility of building a Fresnel lens in the outer Solar System to keep the beam tightly collimated; i.e., we want the narrowest possible beam to put maximum energy on the sail. It was an era when huge structures in space defined interstellar thinking. Forward's lasers were vast and he envisioned a 560,000-ton Fresnel lens in deep space, a structure fully one-third the diameter of the Moon. Such a lens made collimating the laser beam a workable proposition, to say the least -- at 4.3 light years, the distance of Alpha Centauri A and B, such a beam is still converging, and would not reach the size of its 1000 kilometer transmitting aperture until an amazing 44...

Small payloads make sense if we can extract maximum value from them. But remember the problem posed by the rocket equation: It's not just the size of the payload that counts. A chemical rocket has to carry more and more propellant to carry the propellant it needs to carry more propellant, and so on, up the dizzying sequence of the equation until the kind of mission we're interested in -- deep space in reasonable time frames -- is ruled out. That's why other forms of rocket using fission or fusion make a difference. As the saying goes, they get more bang for the buck. But the idea of carrying little or no propellant at all has continued to intrigue the interstellar community, and numerous ways of doing so have been proposed. One early contender was a particle beam, which would be used to push a magnetic sail. Strip electrons from atomic nuclei and accelerate the positively charged particles close to the speed of light. There's a benefit here over laser-beamed sail concepts, for the...

I was delighted to see Doug Stetson, the program manager for The Planetary Society's LightSail effort, quoting Johannes Kepler in last night's webcast. If you missed the Pasadena event, which took place at the KPCC Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, CA, you can watch the recorded session here, and I highly recommend it. Kepler's 1610 letter to Galileo added context to the excitement over LightSail, for solar sailing has a rich history. Kepler wrote of providing "ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes," and added that "there will be some who will brave even that void." It's an inspiring thought as we now look into the launch of a privately funded sail that can join IKAROS and NanoSail-D in a series of operational experiments that will hone our sail knowledge. The chief news of the Pasadena meeting was the announcement of an approximate launch date. LightSail-1 is scheduled to go into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in April of 2016. The quick video Mat Kaplan showed...