With manned missions to Mars in our thinking, both in government space agencies and the commercial sector, the challenge of providing adequate life support emerges as a key factor. We're talking about a mission lasting about two years, as opposed to the relatively...
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Spacecoaches and Beamed Power
If you're planning to make it to the International Space Development Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico next month, be advised that Brian McConnell will be there with thoughts on a subject we've discussed in several earlier posts: A 'spacecoach' that uses water as a...
The Spacecoach Equation
My view is that the spacecoach, the subject of renewed discussion below by Brian McConnell and a design he and Alex Tolley have created, is the most innovative and downright practical idea for getting crews and large payloads to the planets that I've yet encountered....
Spacecoach on the Stage
I'm glad to see that Brian McConnell will be speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Toronto this week. McConnell, you'll recall, has been working with Centauri Dreams regular Alex Tolley on a model the duo call 'Spacecoach.' It's a crewed...
Can an Interstellar Generation Ship Maintain a Population on a 250-year Trip to a Habitable Exoplanet?
I grew up on generation ship stories. I'm thinking of tales like Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, Aldiss' Non-Stop, and (from my collection of old science fiction magazines) Don Wilcox's "The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years." The latter, from 1940, may have been the first...
Food production on Mars: Dirt farming as the most scalable solution for settlement
Colonies on other worlds are a staple of science fiction and an obsession for rocket-obsessed entrepreneurs, but how do humans go about the business of living long-term once they get to a place like Mars? Alex Tolley has been pondering the question as part of a...
Remote Observation: What Could ET See?
As we puzzle out the best observing strategies to pick up a bio- or technosignature, we're also asking in what ways our own world could be observed by another civilization. If such exist, they would have a number of tools at their disposal by which to infer our...
Wind Rider: A High Performance Magsail
Can you imagine the science we could do if we had the capability of sending a probe to Jupiter with travel time of less than a month? How about Neptune in 18 weeks? Alex Tolley has been running the numbers on a concept called Wind Rider, which derives from the plasma...
What If SETI Finds Something, Then What?
Beyond its immediate cultural and philosophical implications, the reception of a signal from another civilization will call for analysis across all academic disciplines as we try to make sense of it. Herewith a proposal for an Interstellar Communication Relay, both...
Introducing the Q-Drive: A concept that offers the possibility of interstellar flight
If Breakthrough Starshot is tackling the question of velocities at a substantial percentage of lightspeed, what do we do about the payload question? A chip-sized spacecraft is challenging in terms of instrumentation and communications, not to mention power. Enter Jeff...