Culture and Society

Posting Problems

May 18, 2013

Marc Millis’ article “Star Trek, Star Tech,” posted on Friday, has been taken down temporarily due to server problems that are now being investigated. As soon as I get these ongoing site maintenance issues resolved, the article will be reposted.

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Harry Stine: Building the Infrastructure

May 15, 2013

Before getting started on today’s post, a reminder that Tau Zero founder Marc Millis and I will be among those interviewed on the History Channel show Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe tonight at 10 PM Eastern US time (0200 UTC on Thursday). Many of the ideas discussed on that show parallel those found in [...]

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A Program for Star Flight

May 14, 2013

We become so bedazzled by the assumptions of our time that we can forget how things looked in different eras. 1973 wasn’t all that many years ago in the cosmic scheme of things, but the early ‘70s were a time of surprising optimism when it came to our future in space. As we saw yesterday, [...]

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Roadmap to the Stars

May 13, 2013

Tau Zero founder Marc Millis and I will be among those interviewed on the upcoming History Channel show Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe, which will air this Wednesday at 10 PM Eastern US time (0200 UTC on Thursday). Being a part of this production was great fun, especially since it meant flying out to [...]

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The Growth of Interstellar Organizations

May 10, 2013

The British Interplanetary Society was founded way back in 1933, and included such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Val Cleaver among its early membership. The Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), also based in London, was founded in 2012 and is not, to the best of my knowledge, yet incorporated. Between the two dates and [...]

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Update on Starship Century Symposium

May 7, 2013

We had a successful launch last night of the ESTCube-1 satellite from Kourou, about which more tomorrow when I’ll be talking about electric sails and their uses both interplanetary and interstellar. But this morning, with the Starship Century Symposium rapidly approaching, I wanted to run this overview, which corrects and updates several things in the [...]

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Robert Goddard’s Interstellar Migration

May 6, 2013

Astronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard is usually thought of in connection with liquid fuel rockets. It was his test flight of such a rocket in March of 1926 that demonstrated a principle he had been working on since patenting two concepts for future engines, one a liquid fuel design, the other a staged rocket using [...]

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Starship Musings: Warping to the Stars

May 2, 2013

by Kelvin F.Long The executive director of the Institute for Interstellar Studies here gives us his thoughts on Star Trek and the designing of starships, with special reference to Enrico Fermi. Kelvin is also Chief Editor for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, whose latest conference is coming up. You’ll find a poster for [...]

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Starship Congress Registration Opens

April 29, 2013

Our friends at Icarus Interstellar continue working on this summer’s conference. Just in from my son Miles is news about the opening of registration for the Dallas event. Registration for the 2013 Starship Congress, hosted by Icarus Interstellar, is now open. The registration fee is $100; however, the first 25 paid registrations receive a $25 [...]

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Starship Century Symposium May 21-22

April 19, 2013

The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination is launching in May with what it describes as a ‘series of perspectives’ on what we can expect in the coming century. Its inaugural symposium begins on May 14 at the University of California at San Diego with discussions on design, artificial intelligence, synthetic life and science [...]

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