Research Tools

Musings on Impartiality

June 24, 2011

Marc Millis, Tau Zero’s founding architect, drawing on his experience with NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and the years of research since, offers us some ideas about impartiality and how scientists can hope to attain it. It’s human nature to want our particular theories to succeed, but when they collide with reality, the lessons learned [...]

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A Look Inside the 100 Year Starship Idea

June 16, 2011

Technology fails at the damnedest times, which is particularly ironic when discussing something as futuristic as a starship. But then, a starship launched in a hundred or more years won’t be worrying about small cassette recorders like my little Olympus, which chewed up the tape on which I was recording the June 16 teleconference held [...]

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100 Year Starship Study: Call for Papers

June 15, 2011

We’re keeping a close eye on the 100 Year Starship Study, and with the call for papers for its upcoming conference just issued, I want to run this verbatim. Addendum: The DARPA teleconference for the 100 Year Starship Study ended about 1215 EST. I’m compiling my notes and should have something up about it either [...]

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100 Year Starship Study Public Symposium

June 15, 2011

The 100 Year Starship Study being developed through DARPA and NASA Ames now has its Web site up, from which the following: DARPA and NASA are jointly planning the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium that will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 in Orlando, FL. The goal of the symposium is to [...]

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Long: Toward an Interstellar Institute

June 8, 2011

Today we continue with responses to the Request for Information from the 100 Year Starship study. Kelvin Long is senior designer and co-founder of Project Icarus, the ambitious attempt to design a fusion starship. A joint project of the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation, Project Icarus takes its inspiration from the original [...]

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100 Year Starship Study: A Response

June 6, 2011

by Marc Millis “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a study to inspire the first steps in the next era of space exploration—a journey between the stars.” So reads the Request for Information document (RFI) that DARPA released recently, seeking ideas for organization, business model and approach for a self-sustaining investment vehicle [...]

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JBIS: Celebrating the ‘Red Cover’ Issues

May 13, 2011

Working on a book on interstellar flight in 2002, I came across a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society with a bold title: “A Programme for Interstellar Exploration.” I already knew that its author, Robert Forward, was a major figure in the world of deep space studies, an aerospace engineer and inventor [...]

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NIAC: Bob Cassanova’s Mug

March 7, 2011

Last week turned into a major disruption for Centauri Dreams. Major server problems that have involved new hardware and all manner of delays struck late on the night of Sunday February 27 and kept the site offline until this past weekend. Sorry for this, and thanks to those of you who kept in touch via [...]

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Toward an Interstellar Bibliography

February 14, 2011

Back when I was first thinking about writing a book on interstellar flight, my reading began with Adrian Berry’s fine study The Giant Leap: Mankind Heads for the Stars. A science writer and novelist, Berry was science correspondent for The Daily Telegraph from 1977 to 1997, and is now the paper’s Consulting Editor (Science). The [...]

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Emerging Exoplanet Resources

January 20, 2010

The Exoplanetology site is developing a tool for those in need of quick exoplanet information. The Exoplanet Seeker is an interface that will make it easy to query various exoplanet databases, including the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia, NASA’s PlanetQuest New Worlds Atlas, the Exoplanet.org site and other sources like the Wikipedia and SIMBAD. Each of these [...]

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