Larry Klaes takes the helm today and tomorrow while I finish up some necessary (not space related) business. Most Centauri Dreams readers, I'm assuming, have seen Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science fiction tale that proved so influential on later depictions of...
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OSIRIS-REx: Course Correction Sets Up Gravity Assist
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, now on a two year outbound journey to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, is a good deal closer to home than you might think. At play is a gravity assist maneuver that will take the craft past the Earth on September 22nd, propelling OSIRIS-REx...
MU69 Occultations Yield KBO Data
Back in June we tracked what the New Horizons team was doing to refine our knowledge of 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt Object toward which New Horizons is now moving (see New Horizons: Occultations in Preparation for MU69). There were actually three of these events, on...
Stagnant Supercivilizations and Interstellar Travel
Just how long can a civilization live? It's a key question, showing up as a factor in the Drake Equation and possibly explaining our lack of success at finding evidence for ETI. But as Andrei Kardashev believed, it is possible that civilizations can live for aeons,...
Breakthrough Starshot ‘Sprites’ in Orbit
If Breakthrough Starshot succeeds in launching a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri in 30 or 40 years, their payloads will be highly miniaturized and built to specifications far beyond our capabilities today. But the small 'Sprites' launched into low Earth orbit...
SailBeam: A Conversation with Jordin Kare
Looking around on the Net for background information about Jordin Kare, who died last week at age 60 (see yesterday's post), I realized how little is available on his SailBeam concept, described yesterday. SailBeam accelerates myriads of micro-sails and turns them...
Near-Term Interstellar Probes: Some Gentle Suggestions
When Greg Matloff's "Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy" appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward's work, and realize...
TRAPPIST-1h: Filling in the Picture
One of the worst things we can do is to get so wedded to a concept that we fail to see conflicting information. That’s true whether the people involved are scientists, or stock brokers, or writers. It’s all too easy to distort the surrounding facts because we want to...
Incentive Trap 2: Calculating Minimum Time to Arrival
When to launch a starship, given that improvements in technology could lead to a much faster ship passing yours enroute? As we saw yesterday, the problem has been attacked anew by René Heller (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research), who re-examined a...
NASA Grant Award to Tau Zero Foundation
NASA has awarded a $500,000 grant to the Tau Zero Foundation for a 3-year study titled "Interstellar Propulsion Review." Unlike prior studies, which were based on a specific mission concept, this study is an overall comparison between the different motivations,...