?Bring an umbrella to Houston? I figured it would be unnecessary and left it out of my luggage. Lo and behold yesterday morning it began to rain and it seems to have continued off and on most of the day. That hardly matters when you’re in a huge high-rise hotel, but it’s a good thing it didn’t happen Wednesday night, when I walked all over downtown looking for restaurants. I favor inexpensive ethnic places with interesting menus but also love any place with a decent wine list and crusty bread baked in-house. I walk 3-5 miles each day and get seriously stressed out when I don’t get in the exercise, so I’m hoping the rain will be gone or at least sporadic enough today to let me get out a bit. Houston’s humidity, I must say, did slow down my pace in each journey I’ve taken so far. No time for walking yesterday, though, as I spent all day in meetings re the 100 Year Starship organization and future planning. It was great fun to be with a small group including 100 Year Starship leader Mae...

?A few words before a long day begins. I’m in meetings all Thursday here in Houston as the 100 Year Starship Symposium gets going, having slept well last night on the gigantic bed provided by the Hyatt. The travel day was uneventful. I had decided to make this a non-digital flight as much as possible so as to get through security with less difficulty. That meant the laptop went in a checked bag, the Kindle stayed home, and for the plane I took an actual book, one with pages that you turn by hand, a cover, and an index in place of a search engine. So much for my plans - everything was going great until a couple of coins in my pocket set off the alarms and I got patted down. Image: Yesterday afternoon's view from my room. The Hyatt Regency has a rotating restaurant on its 31st floor. Despite Calvin Trillin's famous exhortation never to eat in a restaurant that rotates, I found the food quite good, including a spectacular glass of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. Nice view,...

I'm on my way to Houston for the 100 Year Starship symposium, and I should be airborne before this clicks into visibility through the wonders of automation. I'm involved in meetings all day Thursday and then into regular symposium activities for the rest of the weekend, about which I'll be reporting next week and to a certain extent from the site itself. Last year in Orlando I wound up sending out more tweets than blog posts from the actual venue and this year I've decided to more or less play it by ear, seeing what opportunities arise and how best to convey them. If you're following me on Twitter as @centauri_dreams, be advised that I don't know how much I'll be tweeting, but feel free to 'unfollow' me as needed if you start getting more than you bargained for. You can always sign back up again after the symposium. What I've learned over the years is that I'm not good at multitasking, and my priority has to be getting accurate notes from the various workshops and technical sessions...

Making Progress on Star Trek Physics is Marc Millis' foray into crowdsourcing, a just announced project on Kickstarter. For those new to the concept, Kickstarter allows the general public to make donations to projects that are described on the site. A deadline is established and so is a minimum funding goal -- if the goal is not reached by the deadline, no funds are collected. $275 million have been raised for various Kickstarter projects thus far and Millis is hoping to catch this wave in support of a new book on breakthrough propulsion concepts that is aimed at a broad, general audience. Centauri Dreams readers will recall that Millis and Eric Davis co-edited 2009's Frontiers of Propulsion Science, published by the AIAA. The first compilation on topics Millis analyzed as head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, Frontiers was lengthy (22 individual essays in 739 pages) and written specifically with a graduate-level and professional audience in mind. The new project...

The 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium begins next week, with the recently announced news that former president Bill Clinton will serve as honorary chair for the event. I'm not sure whether a US president has ever spoken about starships before, but what Clinton said was this: "This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space, all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on earth." The symposium takes a decidedly multi-disciplinary theme, with speakers on topics ranging from engineering to ethics, philosophy, the social sciences and biology. Our recent discussions about experimenting with self-enclosed ecosystems flow naturally into the upcoming event in light of the range of topics to be covered. In addition to the speakers and scientific papers, four workshops have been announced. Let me pull some excerpts on the workshops directly off the 100 Year Starship page: Workshop 1: Research Priorities for the...

Long journeys by spaceship are a staple of science fiction, but we know all too little about how to sustain a human habitat in a hostile environment. Experiments in closed ecosystems simply reveal how much work will have to go toward this subject before we can talk about moving out into the Solar System, much less sending missions outside of it. One experiment in this direction was Bios-3, conducted at the Institute of Biophysics in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk. John Allen, himself deeply involved with the later Biosphere 2 project, called Bios-3 "something of a clandestine legend to the handful of people actually working on closed life systems." The thought behind Bios-3, which was completed in 1972, was to develop closed ecosystems that could support a crew of up to three in a 315 cubic meter space that would be divided into four areas, one designated for the crew, the others for growing food sources, with xenon lamps acting as the light source and power supplied by a nearby...

As we've had increasing reason to speculate, travel to the stars may not involve biological life forms but robotics and artificial intelligence. David Brin's new novel Existence (Tor, 2012) cartwheels through many an interstellar travel scenario -- including a biological option involving building the colonists upon arrival out of preserved genetic materials -- but the real fascination is in a post-biological solution. I don't want to give anything away in this superb novel because you're going to want to read it yourself, but suffice it to say that uploading a consciousness to an extremely small spacecraft is one very viable possibility. So imagine a crystalline ovoid just a few feet long in which an intelligence can survive, uploaded from the original and, as far as it perceives, a continuation of that original consciousness. One of the ingenious things about this kind of spacecraft in Brin's novel is that its occupants can make themselves large enough to observe and interact with...

Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson responded to yesterday's post about Neil Armstrong with reminiscences of the Apollo program, but because the first of these ran as a comment to the story, I was afraid a lot of readers wouldn't see it -- we have far more subscribers through RSS than any other medium, and many of them do not see the comments. When Al submitted a second comment, I decided to merge them into a single post here. The author of numerous scientific papers and a widely known figure in the interstellar community, Al saw the Apollo program up close as astronaut trainer on the Lunar Module Simulator. Here he talks about Armstrong and Aldrin and the antics of the crew that followed Apollo 11. by A. A. Jackson I spent almost 4 years in the presence of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I came to the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in 1966, where I was placed as a crew training instructor. I had degrees in math and physics at that time. Seems engineers were pressed into real...

"Neil Armstrong may well be the only human being of our time to be remembered 50,000 years from now." -- J. G. Ballard, "Back to the Heady Future," Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1993. If anything, Neil Armstrong was almost too perfect for the role he played. If I had been asked to script the kind of character I'd like to have seen as the first man on the Moon, Armstrong would have walked into the role effortlessly, a quiet, even diffident man who had the courage to ride rockets. Flyers come in all descriptions, but those I used to hang around with in my own flying days (far tamer than any of Armstrong's, to be sure!) were generally raconteurs, full of improbable tales that could never be verified, jongleurs seasoned in the arts of extroversion. Not so Neil Armstrong, and therein lies the reason for my own sense of pride in the man and his accomplishment. July 20, 1969 was, inevitably, a hot day in St. Louis. I had driven to Webster Groves that afternoon to watch the moon landing with my...