In the course of an enjoyable dinner with Douglas Yazell, Shen Ge and Al Jackson (this was in Houston at the 100 Year Starship Symposium), I learned that the Houston section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics was in the process of reprinting, in...
Search Results:
Tau Zero: The Steps Ahead
by Marc Millis Recently I asked you, our readership, what you want from an interstellar organization, given the emergence of Kelvin Long's Interstellar Institute and the pending symposium of the 100 Year Starship Organization. How to sort out which organization does...
Remembering the Early Robotic Explorers
Reflecting back on the history of robotic space missions, Larry Klaes offers a look at the early missions to Venus and Mars, harbingers of the far more complex probes we would later send into the Solar System. The Pioneers, Veneras and Mariners were, in their day, on...
Starships: ‘Skylark’ vs. the Long Haul
Centauri Dreams readers will remember Adam Frank's recent op-ed Alone in the Void in the New York Times arguing that given the difficulty involved in traveling to the stars, humans had better get used to living on and improving this planet. 'We will have no other...
Big Sails, Challenging Dreams
I've been thinking about solar sails these past few days, a topic that inevitably invokes Arthur Holly Compton, who first demonstrated that x-rays have particle-like properties. Compton's experiments in 1923 produced a body of work for which he would receive the Nobel...
Remembering Dandridge Cole
I've been thinking all weekend about Dandridge Cole, the aerospace engineer and futurist whose death at age 44 deprived interstellar studies of one of its most insightful advocates. Cole died in 1965, just five years before a deadline he himself set (in 1953!) for a...
Rogue Stars Leaving the Galaxy
Having just re-read Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars for the first time in a couple of decades, I've been preoccupied by the idea of 'deep time,' and astronomical events that play out over billions of years. The fictional trick, of course, is to pair human...
Our First Galactic Ambassador
by Larry Klaes Larry Klaes is a long-time Centauri Dreams contributor, a practitioner of the Tau Zero Foundation and a serious devotee of space exploration and its history. Here he gives us a look at the Pioneer probes that first took us to the outer Solar System,...
Toward a New ‘Prime Directive’
The Italian contribution to the interstellar effort has been substantial, and I'm pleased to know three of its principal practitioners: Claudio Maccone, Giancarlo Genta, and Giovanni Vulpetti. It was with great pleasure, then, that I took Roberto Flaibani up on his...
A Comet Consumed by the Sun
Imagine what we could do if we could attain speeds of 640 kilometers per second. That's the velocity of a comet recently tracked just before passing across the face of the Sun and apparently disintegrating in the low solar corona. I'm just musing here, but it's always...