Missions

On Missions and Nearby Stars

October 24, 2012

Sara Seager’s thoughts on who might join a crew bound for Alpha Centauri have had resonance, as witness Dennis Overbye’s story Discovery Rekindles Wish for a Journey to the Stars in the New York Times. Overbye, a touchstone in science journalism, has probably been pondering the issue because of Seager’s response to his question about [...]

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Deck Hands for a Four Decade Journey

October 23, 2012

If you were offered a chance to make an interstellar journey, would you take it? How about a garden-variety trip to low-Earth orbit? I’m often asked questions like this when I make presentations to the public, and I have no hesitation in saying no. Though I’m no longer doing any flight instructing, I used to [...]

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Centauri B: Targets and Possibilities

October 19, 2012

Voyager 1, now 17 light hours from Earth, continues to be my touchstone when asked about getting to Alpha Centauri — and in the last few days, I’ve been asked that question a lot. At 17.1 kilometers per second, Voyager 1 would need 74,000 years to reach the blistering orb we now believe to be [...]

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Keeping the Worldship Alive

September 21, 2012

One of the challenges of explaining why a starship project is worth doing even though its final goal may not be realized for a long time is in showing how this work can have an impact on improving things on Earth. Technological spinoffs have acquired a bad name because of the stigma of Teflon and [...]

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Voyager Update: Still in Choppy Waters

August 7, 2012

The continued explorations of our two Voyagers have earned these tough spacecraft the right to be considered an interstellar mission, which is how NASA now describes their journeys. Neither will come anywhere near another star for tens of thousands of years, but in this context ‘interstellar’ means putting a payload with data return into true [...]

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A Near-Term Enterprise?

May 15, 2012

It’s too bad we don’t already have a workable Enterprise, that vast near-term rendition of the Star Trek vehicle that a systems engineer named ‘Dan’ has been talking about on BuildTheEnterprise.org (a site which has been so heavily trafficked in the last 48 hours that it has proven almost inaccessible). What Dan has in mind [...]

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Pushing Beyond Pluto

May 11, 2012

What would you do if you had a spacecraft pushing toward the edge of the Solar System with nothing much to do? The answer is to assign it an extended mission, as we found out with the two Voyagers and their continuing data return that is helping us understand the boundaries of the heliosphere. In [...]

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How Will Humans Fly to the Stars?

April 17, 2012

by Andreas Hein The immense problems of time, distance and life support invariably mean that when we talk about an interstellar mission, we talk about robotics. But the imaginative team at Icarus Interstellar, which is now setting up projects on everything from beamed lightsails (Project Forward) to pulse propulsion engines (Project Helios), has pushed into [...]

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Plutonium-238 and the Outer System

April 4, 2012

Powering up a spacecraft is a lot easier to manage in the Sun-rich environment inside the orbit of Mars than it is out past the orbit of Jupiter. Solar panels provide plenty of power for a satellite in near-Earth orbit, for example, but moving into the outer system invokes the need for RTGs — radioisotope [...]

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Catalyzed Fusion: Tuning Up the Ramjet

March 27, 2012

Long-time Centauri Dreams readers have learned to tolerate my eccentricities (or, at least, they’re kind enough not to dwell on them). One of them is my love of poking around in old books related to space travel, which is how Benjamin Field’s A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont Among the Planets [...]

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