by Marc Millis Here is a holiday gift from Tau Zero as compiled by TZF's founding architect Marc Millis. It's part of Marc's continuing effort to find earlier references to the interstellar concepts -- many of them in fiction -- that we routinely ponder today. Some of these go back to the early 20th Century and in some cases the 19th. Compilations like this are always works in progress, as we found when putting together a list of interstellar propulsion concepts for the first chapter of the book Marc and Eric Davis edited, Frontiers of Propulsion Science, where one memory triggered another and the list kept growing. Readers are encouraged, then, to add other references to older material, as those of us who delight in prowling through old science fiction magazines have access to a mother lode of fictional precedents. I'll also mention that this post will be the last of 2011 -- as I did last week, I'll skip the Friday and Monday posts in honor of the holiday, with the next post...

I’ve been hoping to publish a dialogue between Michael Michaud and myself ever since talking to him at the 100 Year Starship Symposium and pondering his paper “Long-Term Perspectives on Interstellar Flight." Centauri Dreams readers will know Michael as the author of the must-have Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (Springer, 2006), and will also remember his contributions to previous articles in these pages. He has served as director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Advanced Technology and acted as chairman of working groups at the International Academy of Astronautics that discuss SETI issues, in addition to publishing numerous articles and papers on the implications of contact. In this dialogue, I took some of the elements of his 100 Year Starship presentation and used them as the launching pad for an exploration of how to turn humanity’s attention starward. PG: Michael, I’ve been going through the paper you presented...

I normally scan through various news items for the Notes & Queries posts, but in this case I've been trying to catch up on my reading. In particular, I've been looking at books that could be useful in inspiring young people to get interested in astronomy and engineering. Here's a look at three titles that more or less fit that bill. The budding rocket scientist will love the revised Zubrin, particularly with its infectious and expansive sense of what's possible, but younger students may find their minds tweaked by the two other selections, both of which I'd recommend for a high-school audience. We never know what can launch a career, but scientists are always reminding me of particular books they read when they were kids that made all the difference. Back to the Red Planet Toward the end of Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars (revised edition, 2011), the author looks at three possible models for getting humans to the Red Planet. It's a significant section because Zubrin recognizes the...

Be aware that the History Channel show The Universe will air an episode at 2200 EST tonight (December 13) in which Richard Obousy will discuss interstellar propulsion concepts. The air time will probably vary depending on your cable provider, so be sure to check. Richard, once project leader of the Icarus effort and still actively involved at every stage of the Icarus design, is a Texas-based physicist whose work we have often discussed in these pages. I was there for his presentation on Icarus at the recent Oak Ridge interstellar workshop and look forward to seeing him on the tube. Addendum: This episode is now available online.

If we ever achieve manned missions to the stars, one of the assumptions is that we will find planets much like Earth that we might live on and colonize. But what if the assumption is flawed? There are surely many Earth analogues in the Milky Way, but we don't know how widely they are spaced, and a near-miss isn't necessarily helpful, as both Mars and Venus attest. People like Robert Zubrin continue to advocate terraforming as a solution for Mars, and it may well happen one day, but supposing we get to another star, would we have the moral right to terraform a world with living creatures on it, even if they didn't meet our criteria for intelligence? Robert Kennedy (The Ultimax Group), working with colleagues Kenneth Roy and David Fields, has been pondering these issues and went through a possible solution at the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge. If we stop worrying about Earth analogues, a range of interesting possibilities open up, as our own Solar System...

Les Johnson (MSFC) always says that the coolest job title he ever had in his long career at NASA was Manager of Interstellar Propulsion Research. Think about it -- if going to the stars is your passion and you have a title like that, you must feel that you have really arrived. These days he goes by the more prosaic title of Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, but as the recent interstellar workshop in Oak Ridge demonstrated, he's also ranging widely on his own as conference organizer, author and science fiction aficionado. His presentation in Oak Ridge was designed to jump start the conference with a survey of the problems of interstellar flight and the long list of possible propulsion solutions. The Interstellar Conundrum The problems are clear enough. Think of the distance between the Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometers). That's 1 astronomical unit (AU). Shrink that distance to one foot and imagine the Solar...