While I've often opined in these pages that a Solar System-wide infrastructure must emerge before we can contemplate interstellar flight, the obvious question is how we get there. Stephen Ashworth (Oxford, UK), who writes the insightful Astronautical Evolution blog, recently tackled the subject with such vigor that I asked him for permission to run his essay verbatim, especially since it grew out of a discussion right here on Centauri Dreams. If you're trying to do something spectacular -- like growing a global civilization into an interplanetary one and boosting wealth into the realms needed to push to the stars -- how would you go about it? Ashworth's vision for the 'ten-billion-times growth factor' makes the needed transformation. Is it a logical extrapolation or does it push too far? A lively debate should grow out of this one. As a lifelong jazz buff, I can't resist adding that Stephen is to be heard on tenor sax playing jazz standards at the Monday evening jam sessions at...

Yesterday's discussion about Man Will Conquer Space Soon!, the landmark series in Collier's that so elegantly defined the 1950s view of space travel, has me in a retrospective mood. The Collier's series was highly visible, and those old enough to have seen it tend to remember its concepts whether or not they're in an aerospace-related profession today. But a few years later a TV show called "Men Into Space" turned up on CBS, fighting for audience share and generally out-publicised by the network's "Twilight Zone" offering. It would run only a single season and end in September of 1960, months before Yuri Gagarin's daring ride in a Vostok. But "Men Into Space" sticks with me for a reason. Its 38 episodes followed Col. Edward McCauley (played by William Lundigan) through a variety of space situations, using him as a viewpoint character while the astronauts he worked with dealt with breakthroughs and problems. In that sense there was a certain similarity to what would become the Mercury...

In the course of an enjoyable dinner with Douglas Yazell, Shen Ge and Al Jackson (this was in Houston at the 100 Year Starship Symposium), I learned that the Houston section of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics was in the process of reprinting, in its entirety, the famous Collier's series on manned spaceflight. Yazell is editor of Horizons, the bi-monthly publication of the Houston group, and fortunately for all of us, it is both online and free. For me, revisiting these stirring articles will be a priority as each comes out. The July/August issue contains Collier's for March 22, 1952, first in the series. I can only imagine how this issue of Collier's would have drawn the eye in the typical early 1950s newsstand. The Chesley Bonestell cover shows an enormous winged rocket staging as it soars above an Earth flecked with cloud and crimson with distant sunlight. Evidently we have Scott Lowther to thank for scanning and repairing the entire Collier's series, a fact...

by Shen Ge Coming up this January is a two-week long "minds-on ties-off" research workshop at Callao Salvaje on Tenerife on the Canary Islands. I learned about the organization behind the workshop -- the Scientific Preparatory Academy for Cosmic Explorers -- in Houston when I had the good fortune to have dinner with its young co-founder Shen Ge. Shen's organization is a nonprofit academic and research corporation created by young people from many countries. It began this year with a July conference on the Isle of Man, and will soon enter what it considers Phase 1: Building educational modules for brief space courses that can be taught at the university level. The ultimate goal is an actual university with full-time faculty and students. I asked the energetic Shen if he could supply us with a brief article outlining his vision and the steps ahead. In some respects, Shen's ideas parallel those of the International Space University, as he notes below, although he hopes to extend their...

At the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houson, I sent out a large number of tweets as @centauri_dreams. That Twitter account is still live, but be aware that my son Miles, who is now working actively with us, has set up a new account solely for the Tau Zero Foundation. You can access @TZFoundation to pick up interesting links and news of the interstellar community. I suspect, for example, that when Miles runs across articles like the one I'm going to be discussing today, they'll appear on Twitter, but he's bound to find a lot of good material that I miss. Yesterday we were looking at distance issues as Larry Klaes discussed the extension of Ithaca, NY's Sagan Planet Walk all the way to Hawaii, where a new 'station' represents Alpha Centauri. Matters of scale are important to convey to the public because getting across the distances involved in interstellar flight is tricky, and various ways of modeling them can provide the needed perspective. Peter Garretson thinks about scale as...

I’m always looking for ways to relate interstellar distances to common objects on Earth, knowing that misunderstandings about the vast scale of the universe are common. Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) talked about dropping a pea off the side of a ship after every mile on an ocean voyage the distance of the nearest star, telling his readers that it would require ‘a fleet of 10,000 ships of 600 tons burthen, each starting with a full cargo of peas.’ Herschel was the first to try to measure the distance to Alpha Centauri, and while his numbers weren’t as accurate as ours, he captured for his era the disconnect between Earthly distances and the heavens. Larry Klaes weighs in this morning with yet another way to study the issue, using an exhibition on the interplanetary scale that has now been extended Herschel-style to the ultimate voyage. By Larry Klaes Since its dedication in 1997, the Sagan Planet Walk has become a landmark feature of downtown Ithaca, New York. The various monuments, or...

Because I utterly lack their skills, I have huge admiration for practical-minded people who can organize things well. Eric Davis’ work as track chair for the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track in Houston is a case in point. The challenge is in coping with a key fact of interstellar studies: We are so early in the game that we have not remotely figured out which propulsion method makes the most sense for journeys of this magnitude. Discussing time and distance means culling papers to find a balance of ideas, from what could be near-term (fusion, although it always seems near-term) to highly speculative (antimatter and nanotech). Image: Physicist Eric Davis, a highly visible figure at the Houston conference. Eric nailed the composition of the track, and it was because of that that I stayed in it through the conference. The temptation of getting involved with alternate tracks on ‘Becoming an Interstellar Civilization’ and especially ‘Destinations and Habitats’ was huge, but it was the...

While I didn't see too many technical glitches at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, I ran into plenty of them in my own attempts to cover the event. The banquet hall where the opening ceremonies were held -- and where the plenary sessions occurred each day -- was impervious to the hotel's WiFi, so that I was unable to use Twitter. Friday's technical sessions in the conference rooms went fine, and I managed to send out a steady stream of tweets from the 'Time and Distance Solutions' track. But halfway through the Saturday sessions, Twitter itself went down. I tried all afternoon to get on, but though my Net connection was strong, Twitter wouldn't come up. Image: Early arrivals setting up at the opening plenary session for the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Everything in order but the WiFi. My experience with US Airways was about the same. The two flights out to Houston were uneventful, but coming back I was on an aircraft that reached new levels of passenger compression. With...

? At left is Mae Jemison, snapped from my seat as she spoke to open yesterday morning's sessions. I couldn't tweet about her comments because the hotel Wi-Fi wasn't working in the room. Several people asked me today why I was still using a ‘netbook’ to take notes and send out tweets from the Houston symposium. It’s an easy answer -- I need a standard keyboard rather than a virtual one, and despite the beauty of tablets like the iPad, I don’t want to carry a separate keyboard around. Besides, my little 10-inch screen Asus serves me well, gives me all the connectivity I need, and runs Linux much faster than the original Windows that it came with (I blew Windows off the hard disk as soon as I bought it and slipped Ubuntu on effortlessly, continually updating it ever since). At $350, which is what it set me back a few years ago, the netbook is a no-brainer for places where I need to make a lot of notes, and if I leave it in a taxi or drop it, the financial loss is minuscule. Image: Mae...