Tracking down starflight in literature is an absorbing pastime. When I was writing my Centauri Dreams book, I found that I was vaguely familiar with many of the antecedents of today's science fictional journeys, but a book called Wunderwelten, by Friedrich Wilhelm Mader, took me by surprise. A 1911 adventure novel for young readers, Wunderwelten imagines a sphere that, in the fashion of the time's space fiction, was moved by antigravity in a multi-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Mader's ship, called 'Sannah,' was a precursor to all the Centauri-bound starships to come. What a delight to find Sannah emerge in the form of Sannah III in Stephen Baxter's story "Star Call," which appears in the recently published Starship Century. But Baxter's updated ship is a far cry from the 50-meter antigravity vessel imagined by Mader. For one thing, it's gifted with artificial intelligence: I am called Sannah III because I am the third of four copies who were created in the NuMind Laboratory at the...

Could there be a more time-worn trope in science fiction than the arrival of colonists or explorers on a new world? The stage is set for adventure and the unwinding of whatever plot theme the author has in mind, but if the planet is Earth-like, we see the colonists quickly settling in, adapting to local conditions and, in relatively short order, creating a new society. Back in the 1950s the film When Worlds Collide showed the arrival of desperate survivors of a doomed Earth on a planet that would be their refuge, the assumption being that from this point on, everything would be no more difficult than setting up a camp on some new continent. Would it be so? For that matter, would our human crew be able to survive the journey? Paul Davies has his doubts, and he expressed them forcefully at the recent Starship Century event in San Diego. While we tend to concentrate on time and distance problems -- how do you get something moving fast enough to get your crew to another star within a...

NASA has released an Asteroid Initiative Request for Information on the issue of asteroid retrieval. It's an interesting document both in its audience -- the agency is making a point about soliciting comments not only from academics, scientists and engineers but the general public -- but also because of the issues it explores. Being sought are ideas on how best to capture an asteroid, land an astronaut on one, and change its orbit, not necessarily in that order. The Los Angeles Times quotes NASA associate director Robert Lightfoot on the public component of NASA's initiative: "Too often, by the time we present a mission to the public, it has already been baked, and there's not much we can change. This is your chance to present your ideas to us before the mission is baked." If you're interested in contributing, move quickly, for the deadline for responses is July 18, with a workshop to follow in September. The creation of a Solar System-wide infrastructure will necessarily precede any...

The star Gliese 667C is as intriguing as it is because it underlines in triplicate the 'habitability' question, which surfaces every time a planet is discovered in a zone around its star where liquid water could exist on the surface. This is the classic definition of 'habitable zone,' meaning not so much a place where humans could live -- we have no knowledge of other conditions on these worlds, knowing little more than their minimum mass -- but a place where a basic condition for life as we know it is possible. I'm much in favor of considering exotic environments for life, and these would include venues ranging from the upper clouds of Venus to the depths of the icy gas giant satellites in our own system. But when we read about 'habitable zones' in most scientific papers, we're usually falling back on the liquid water criterion because it's hard enough to search for any kind of life on a distant world, much less a kind that we don't even know exists. Liquid water is a starting...

What does it take to conceive a new vision of the future and drive the idea forward? Keith Cooper, editor of Astronomy Now as well as Principium, the journal of the Institute for Interstellar Studies, examines the question in the context of a new book. Grand ideas aren't enough, for the commitment to build community and expand the audience for a breakthrough are the necessary foundation. What Gerard O'Neill and Eric Drexler can teach us about this and how their example may inform the future choices of the interstellar movement are at the heart of Keith's review. Along the way come many questions, especially this: Is a 'failure of nerve to play the long game' what is holding us back as we contemplate a future among the stars? by Keith Cooper In 1972, a think-tank of businessmen, politicians, economists, scientists and bureaucrats going by the name 'The Club of Rome' (they held their first meeting in the Italian capital in 1968) painted a picture of a dystopian future where by the year...

There was a time when people collected old photographs in drawers and photo albums, a time before the digital age when you wasted three or four shots getting just the one you wanted, and the perishability of film was born home every time you saw colors fading on an old image. Yesterday I browsed through black and white snapshots of family members long gone, pictures taken in the 1920s and 1930s, and thought about how we try to preserve memory by framing a moment. Then I thought about how July 19, 2013 was itself going to be preserved, a celestial alignment snatched from time as seen from deep in the Solar System. Carolyn Porco, who serves as imaging team leader for the Cassini Saturn orbiter, calls July 19 'a day for all the world to celebrate.' Cassini will look back at our planet and snap our picture in natural color next to the fabulous system of rings and moons it's been showing us all along. Thus a pixel from Cassini's 1.44 billion kilometers will become an opportunity for...

Adam Crowl concludes his discussion of the recent Starship Century conference in San Diego. Videos from the session are now becoming available online. by Adam Crowl Lunch at the Starship Century Symposium was provided by UCSD, allowing attendees to remain nearby, adding to the discussion and trading of ideas and concerns. Certainly I appreciated the chance to catch up with friends and faces from the other side of the Pacific, as well as meeting new people. Having read people's novels, books or scientific papers for years, then meeting them on Facebook or email, I felt like I knew some of them already. Meeting authors that I had grown up with like Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman or David Brin was something I was getting used to, as I was more eager to discuss their interstellar ideas than succumb to fan-shock. I finally had my ideas about Larry Niven's fusion-shield, from his "Known Space" stories, confirmed by the source, but didn't quite get to talk to David Brin about the Fermi Paradox...

We're fortunate to have had Centauri Dreams regular Adam Crowl not just as an attendee but a speaker at the recent Starship Century symposium in San Diego. Here Adam, in the first of a two-part report, gives us a look at the speakers and their ideas. With regards to comments, please note: In the last week we've had a lengthy discussion of inclusivity in the space community that has absorbed two comment threads. Anyone who wants to continue that discussion can do so in our Facebook group. On this site we need to get back on topic, in this case, the ideas on interstellar flight presented at this conference and where they take us. by Adam Crowl The Starship is still about 100 years away, but we will begin building it this century. This was the message that Gregory Benford and his mirror-twin, James Benford, were proclaiming together in San Diego, with the help of notables of both science and science fiction. And me. Just how I got involved is another story. Suffice it to say that I know...

Congratulations to Icarus Interstellar, which with five days to go has easily surpassed its goal of raising $10,000 on Kickstarter. The campaign supports the Starship Congress to be held in Dallas August 15-18 at the Anatole Hilton Conference Center. It is described on the Kickstarter page as "...a forum where scientists, physicists, engineers, researchers, urban designers, representatives from international space programs and present-day commercial space operators, as well as popular and well-known interstellar speakers and space journalists share their visions for how the future of spaceflight and interstellar exploration is to unfold." The Kickstarter description also includes a quick refresher on Project Icarus itself, the main goals of which are: To design a credible interstellar probe that is a concept design for a potential mission this century; To allow a direct technology comparison with Daedalus and provide an assesment of the maturity of fusion-based space propulsion for...

The all too early death of Iain Banks conjures up so many images from his books that I can't begin to list them all here. Grant his sly word-play, his wit, his deft management of character and you're still left with a sense of gratitude for the sheer poetry of his landscapes. In Look to Windward, a character named Kabe walks the streets of blacked out city, down along a dark canal whose quayside is softened by snow. Then he looks up and the universe rotates: The snow was easing now. Spinwards, over the city center and the still more distant mountains, the clouds were parting, revealing a few of the brighter stars as the weather system cleared. A thin, dimly glowing line directly above -- coming and going as the clouds moved slowly overhead -- was far-side light. No aircraft or ships that he could see. Even the birds of the air seemed to have stayed in their roosts. Spinwards... We're on one of Banks' 'orbitals,' space habitats formed as enormous rings millions of kilometers in...

Stephen Ashworth's April essay at Astronautical Evolution deals with a question of considerable scientific interest: When will Voyager 1 leave the Solar System? But writer, researcher and jazz saxophonist Ashworth also has a philosophical streak, writing articles so far this year on the prospects for a technological singularity, the role of space in a society threatened with ecological disruption, and the business model best suited for manned spaceflight. In this essay, Stephen brings us a report from a recent seminar that mixes philosophy and starships, with consequential questions about autonomous technology, the role of discovery in combating intellectual stagnation, and the geopolitics of deep space exploration. by Stephen Ashworth The Institute for Interstellar Studies plans to run a symposium annually at the British Interplanetary Society's headquarters in London. The first of these events took place on 29 May, dedicated to the philosophy of the starship, and was organized by...

At the 2012 100YSS Symposium, Heath Rezabek presented what he calls the 'Vessel Archives' proposal, a strategy for sustaining and conveying Earth's cultural and biological heritage that was directly inspired by Gregory Benford's Library of Life proposal (preprint available here). Heath tells me his major concern is in "improving the prospects for Earth-originating life through the longevity of our interstellar aspirations and through the application of advanced discoveries to enhance life's prospects on Earth." Independent of his role as Outreach and Collaborations Coordinator for Icarus Interstellar's Starship Congress 2013, he is also an accepted presenter for that conference. Recently Heath contacted me about a research project he is conducting with implications for the interstellar community, as explained below. In his non-interstellar work, Heath Rezabek (MLIS) is a futurist librarian, technology grants coordinator, writer, and systems designer. He lives in Austin, TX, where he...

Marc Millis' article "Star Trek, Star Tech," posted on Friday, has been taken down temporarily due to server problems that are now being investigated. As soon as I get these ongoing site maintenance issues resolved, the article will be reposted.

Before getting started on today's post, a reminder that Tau Zero founder Marc Millis and I will be among those interviewed on the History Channel show Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe tonight at 10 PM Eastern US time (0200 UTC on Thursday). Many of the ideas discussed on that show parallel those found in Harry Stine's program for interstellar exploration. Stine drew on the work of Stephen Dole, whose 1964 book Habitable Planets for Man identified 14 stars within a distance of 22 light years in the spectral classes between M2 and F2. Dole thought there was a 43 percent probability of at least one habitable planet around one of these 14 stars, and Stine's interstellar program began with a series of probes that would investigate them, looking first for gas giants. The idea is that a gas giant flags the presence of other, smaller planets, key information in Stine's day. Forty years later, we know how to find gas giants through radial velocity and transit studies. It's true that 'hot...

We become so bedazzled by the assumptions of our time that we can forget how things looked in different eras. 1973 wasn't all that many years ago in the cosmic scheme of things, but the early '70s were a time of surprising optimism when it came to our future in space. As we saw yesterday, physicist Robert Forward laid out a plan for interstellar expansion to a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1975, even as a thoughtful Michael Michaud worked out his own concepts in a series of papers in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. But nudging ahead of both men by a few years was G. Harry Stine. Already making a name for himself as a science fiction writer under the pseudonym Lee Correy, Stine was a futuristic thinker who fired readers' imaginations with a cover article in the October, 1973 Analog, an issue whose artwork I reproduce here. Rick Sternbach's cover caught my eye when I first saw this issue while toiling as a grad student that year, but it was the...

Tau Zero founder Marc Millis and I will be among those interviewed on the upcoming History Channel show Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe, which will air this Wednesday at 10 PM Eastern US time (0200 UTC on Thursday). Being a part of this production was great fun, especially since it meant flying out to Oakland for a visit with my son Miles, who is now actively involved in interstellar matters. On long car trips when he was a boy, I would have Miles read Heinlein, Andre Norton and the like aloud while I drove -- terrific memories -- so you can imagine what a kick it is to see him as mesmerized by the human future in space as I am. The idea of getting a payload to another star seemed closer in the days of those car trips. I'm sure that's because we were coming off the successful Apollo program and assumed that a similarly directed effort could push us rapidly to the edge of the Solar System and beyond. It was in 1975, the year of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (the last time an Apollo...

The British Interplanetary Society was founded way back in 1933, and included such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Val Cleaver among its early membership. The Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), also based in London, was founded in 2012 and is not, to the best of my knowledge, yet incorporated. Between the two dates and mostly emerging in the first decade of the 21st Century are a number of organizations that in one way or another focus on what I call 'interstellar studies,' meaning science and engineering dedicated to interstellar flight. The trick becomes to keep everything straight. When I started writing my Centauri Dreams book back in 2002, the BIS was a clear model for what a small group of dedicated workers could achieve. It had produced a Moon mission concept as early as the 1930s and went on to create the first fully realized design for an interstellar craft, Project Daedalus. The BIS used the 'red issues' of its journal to focus on interstellar work while JBIS was...

We had a successful launch last night of the ESTCube-1 satellite from Kourou, about which more tomorrow when I'll be talking about electric sails and their uses both interplanetary and interstellar. But this morning, with the Starship Century Symposium rapidly approaching, I wanted to run this overview, which corrects and updates several things in the post I published a couple of weeks ago. Seats are still available for those of you in range. Thanks to Jim Benford for the following: The Starship Century Symposium is the inaugural event at the new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego, Tuesday Wednesday, May 21-22. The program is located here. The symposium celebrates the publication of the Benfords' anthology, Starship Century. Jon Lomberg, the artist who collaborated extensively with Carl Sagan, has read the book and has this comment: Starship Century is the definitive document of this moment in humanity's long climb to the stars. Here you can find the...

Astronautics pioneer Robert H. Goddard is usually thought of in connection with liquid fuel rockets. It was his test flight of such a rocket in March of 1926 that demonstrated a principle he had been working on since patenting two concepts for future engines, one a liquid fuel design, the other a staged rocket using solid fuels. "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," published in 1920, was a treatise published by the Smithsonian that developed the mathematics behind rocket flight, a report that discussed the possibility of a rocket reaching the Moon. While Goddard's work could be said to have anticipated many technologies subsequently developed by later engineers, the man was not without a visionary streak that went well beyond the near-term, expressing itself on at least one occasion on the subject of interstellar flight. Written in January of 1918, "The Ultimate Migration" was not a scientific paper but merely a set of notes, one that Goddard carefully tucked away from view, as...

by Kelvin F.Long The executive director of the Institute for Interstellar Studies here gives us his thoughts on Star Trek and the designing of starships, with special reference to Enrico Fermi. Kelvin is also Chief Editor for the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, whose latest conference is coming up. You'll find a poster for the Philosophy of the Starship conference at the end of this post. Like many, I have been inspired and thrilled by the stories of Star Trek. The creation of Gene Roddenberry was a wonderful contribution to our society and culture. I recently came across an old book in the shop window of a store and purchased it straight away. The book was titled The Making of Star Trek, The book on how to write for TV!, by Stephen E.Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. It was published by Ballantine books in 1968 - the same year that the Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. What with all this and Project Apollo happening, the late 1960s was...