A good futurist can come up with all kinds of outcomes for humanity, but for those of us consumed by space exploration, a recent article in The Economist sketches a particularly bleak possibility. Forget about the stars. For that matter, forget about Mars, even the Moon. The new reality is emerging in the symbolic end of the Space Shuttle program and the eventual de-orbiting of the International Space Station. It's a reality based on a space program that fares no higher than geostationary orbit and the growing technosphere that encloses us like a planetary ring. The End of the Space Age is a cautionary tale about an all too real possibility, one that dismisses those anxious to move into the Solar System as 'space cadets,' while invoking the space ideas of the 1950s and 60s as an almost surreal excursion that quickly gave way to the outright fantasy of 'Star Trek.' The Economist will have none of the old optimism, the vision of ever expanding humanity pushing out to build an...

Here's the latest in the weekly collection of space writing known as the Carnival of Space, in which people with their eyes on the stars go to work to explain the latest findings. Let's start with the Sun, for even as we push our investigations of distant exoplanets, we have much to learn about the nearest star, as our recent discussion of the Solar Probe Plus reminds us. Launching this week's Carnival, Vega 0.0 explains the plasma beta parameter, the ratio of gas pressure to magnetic pressure on the Sun, in an environment where plasma behaves like a fluid. In his Astroblog, the ever reliable Ian Musgrave offers up a review of Stellarium 0.10.6.1. Stellarium, for those not already acquainted with it, is a great, free photo-realistic planetarium program that amateurs should find helpful. Does Ian like it? Evidently so, given his description of the piece as an 'enthusiastic Fan Boi review.' And having worked with Stellarium myself, I can see why he's enchanted with its possibilities....

Because I'm immersed in Laura Snyder's wonderful book The Philosophical Breakfast Club (Broadway Books, 2011), I've been thinking lately about William Whewell. Long the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell helped bring sound, inductive methods to the fore in the science of his day, created models of international cooperation in scientific investigations through his studies of the tides, founded the discipline of mathematical economics, studied crystallography and, in one memorable episode, became involved in a 19th Century imbroglio over alien life. This morning I want to focus on that incident, but it's just one of the numerous episodes Snyder recounts in her history, which follows four remarkable men -- Whewell, mathematician Charles Babbage, astronomer John Herschel (son of William) and economist Richard Jones -- through a lifetime of friendship and scientific inquiry. What's fascinating about Whewell's brush with the topic of extraterrestrial life is that it reveals how...

All weekend long, as the dreadful news and heart-wrenching images from Japan kept coming in, I wondered how press coverage of the nuclear reactor situation would be handled. The temptation seemed irresistible to play the story for drama and maximum fear, citing catastrophic meltdowns, invoking Chernobyl and even Hiroshima, along with dire predictions about the future of nuclear power. My first thought was that the Japanese reactors were going to have the opposite effect than many in the media suppose. By showing that nuclear plants can survive so massive an event, they'll demonstrate that nuclear power remains a viable option. This is an important issue for the Centauri Dreams readership not just in terms of how we produce energy for use here on Earth, but because nuclear reactors are very much in play in our thinking about future deep space missions. Thus the public perception of nuclear reactors counts, and I probably don't have to remind any of you that when the Cassini orbiter...

Isn't it fascinating how the Voyager spacecraft keep sparking the public imagination? When Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989, the encounter was almost elegaic. It was as if we were saying goodbye to the doughty mission that had done so much to acquaint us with the outer Solar System, and although there was talk of continuing observations, the public perception was that Voyager was now a part of history. Which it is, of course, but the two spacecraft keep bobbing up in the news, reminding us incessantly about the dimensions of the Solar System, its composition, its relationship to the challenging depths of interstellar space the Voyagers now enter. In the public eye, Voyager has acquired a certain patina of myth, a fact once noted by NASA historian Roger Launius and followed up by author Stephen Pyne in his book Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery: ...the Voyager mission tapped into a heritage of exploration -- that was its cultural power. But there was...

by Kelvin Long Physicist and aerospace engineer Kelvin Long is the co-founder of Project Icarus, the interstellar design study that is a successor to Project Daedalus. Here he gives us a look at the history of the British Interplanetary Society, whose accomplishments and continuing efforts in the area of interstellar propulsion have energized the entire field. As well as being an active Tau Zero practitioner, Long is a fellow of the BIS and a member of the recently reconstituted BIS Technical Committee, and the Assistant Editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. More about the history of the BIS can be read in the BIS publication 'Interplanetary' written by the current President Bob Parkinson, which is now available from the society's Web site. The British Interplanetary Society (BIS) is a name synonymous with interstellar travel throughout its history. First formed by Philip E. Cleator in Liverpool in 1933, the organization's headquarters were subsequently moved...

Students interested in getting involved in space research should be aware of NASA's Space Technology Research Fellowships. The agency is currently seeking applications from graduate students at accredited US universities for the fellowships, with a deadline for submitting fellowship proposals of 23 February. The fellowships, which are sponsored by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, are available to US graduate student researchers who show 'significant potential to contribute to NASA's strategic space technology objectives through their studies.' NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun describes the program: "Our Space Technology Graduate Fellowships will help create the pool of highly skilled workers needed for NASA's and our nation's technological future, motivating many of the country's best young minds into educational programs and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This fellowship program is coupled to a larger, national research and development effort...

by Marc Millis On January 11 & 12, I participated in a gathering of roughly 30 individuals to learn about and discuss the DARPA/Ames 100-year Starship Study. In addition to reporting on those events, I've included my personal commentary at the end of this report. Recall that in October 2010, the Director of NASA/Ames, Pete Worden, inadvertently revealed that DARPA was funding Ames to the tune of $1M for such a study. This triggered something of a media flurry and shortly thereafter DARPA issued this press release. This January meeting was the first step in their process to involve the insights of others. I requested and was granted an invitation. The gathering was held in a 1903 fort that had been converted a couple of years ago into a modern lodge and meeting area (Fort Baker, now Cavallo Point). Its location near the base of the Golden Gate Bridge provided a calm, out-of-the-way location with few distractions. The meeting began at noon on the first day, carried on (with breaks)...

I remember thinking when Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 that it would be a test case for how long a spacecraft would last. The subject was on my mind because I had been thinking about interstellar probes, and the problem of keeping electronics alive for a century or more even if we did surmount the propulsion problem. The Voyagers weren't built to test such things, of course, but it's been fascinating to watch as they just keep racking up the kilometers. As of this morning, Voyager 1 is 17,422,420,736 kilometers from the Earth (16 hours, 8 minutes light time). Then you start looking at system performance and have to shake your head. As the spacecraft continue their push into interstellar space, only a single instrument on Voyager 1 has broken down. Nine other instruments have been powered down on both craft to save critical power resources, but as this article in the Baltimore Sun pointed out recently, each Voyager has five still-funded experiments and seven that are still...

It’s an interactive morning here in the eastern US, one in which partial solar eclipses can be viewed from more or less anywhere on the planet, asteroids can be chased by school children using data from automatic telescopes in Hawaii, and exoplanet discoveries can be made by gas workers in South Yorkshire. Let’s start with the eclipse, as seen in the image at left that was fed into the Twitterstream by space journalist extraordinaire Daniel Fischer. The accompanying tweet tells us that Fischer was in Aachen with a German TV crew when the photo was made. Those with unlimited cash can chase eclipses physically, and there is a certain romance in the act, but the real world is made up mostly of those of us who can’t be in the right place at the right time, which is why webcasts from Barcelona to Lahore were worth watching as they covered the event, or tried to. This eclipse was visible to those in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia whose local skies cleared in time to make it...

If you charted the appearance of certain stars in books through the last two centuries, which ones would get the most hits? It's an interesting question that Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) ponders on his systemic site, using Google's Ngram viewer as his tool. Ngram lets you plug in the terms of your choice and chart their appearance, using the vast collection scanned into Google Books. When Laughlin plugged in Alpha Centauri, it seemed a safe term to use. The closest star(s) to our own are always going to get a fair amount of attention. He added Proxima Centauri, Beta Pictoris, 51 Pegasi and 61 Cygni. The chart (shown below) is a bit startling when you realize that the blue spike at its left represents not Alpha Centauri but 61 Cygni, but everything becomes clear when you add in the fact that 61 Cygni was the first star other than the Sun to have its distance measured, making it a major player in 19th Century astronomical references. Greg also reminds us of the Scottish polymath...

The serious study of flight to the stars is a comparatively recent phenomenon. One of the early papers to take interstellar travel to a new level -- and to my knowledge the first technical article on manned interstellar missions -- was Leslie Shepherd's 'Interstellar Flight,' which appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1952. These days we all tinker with sociology and psychology, musing about what drives a society spaceward, but Shepherd, a British physicist and one of the godfathers of today's interstellar work, thought the reasons were obvious. We'll go to the stars out of scientific curiosity and the pure love of adventure. Thus the view from a somewhat more optimistic 1952, at least where space was concerned. It was an era when what seemed possible far outweighed the budgetary and political concerns that would silence efforts like Project Orion and, eventually, Apollo itself. But Shepherd, who at the time he wrote the paper was technical director for...

Although Jane Smiley has made the haunting story of the Viking settlement of Greenland widely known in her novel The Greenlanders (Knopf, 1988), we have few modern accounts that parallel what happened in remote places like Brattahlið and Garðar, where Erik the Red's settlements, which had lasted for 500 years, eventually fell victim to climate and lack of external supplies. But local extinctions and near-misses are important because, as John Hickman explains in his new book Reopening the Space Frontier (Technology and Society, 2010), they promote the kind of story-telling that Smiley is so skillful at, advancing the case that not just settlements but entire species can fail when conditions turn ugly. Image: A reproduction of a Norse church in Greenland, with Eriksfjord in the background. Credit: Hamish Laird/Wikimedia Commons. In this excerpt from the book, Hickman writes about three modern parallels to 15th Century Greenland, the first being the Sable Island mutiny, where...

Our recent discussion of Richard Gott and Robert Vanderbei's Sizing Up the Universe has me thinking about representing unfathomably huge scenarios in two-dimensional media, as Gott managed to do so brilliantly with his four-page gatefold map of the universe. How to manage such a feat, and the theory behind map-making of all kinds, can be found in the book, and all of it came to mind as I looked at Ashland Astronomy Studio's new Stars of the Northern Hemisphere poster. A full color sky map on a 36 x 24 glossy sheet, it's a handsome rendition of over 2400 stars. Centauri Dreams regular Erik Anderson is the creator, and he's been careful to add -- beyond the inset closeups of the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters, star names, asterisms and coordinate systems -- the location of exoplanet host stars. Exoplanet charting is indeed the new frontier, a depiction of new lands that calls to mind the painstaking efforts of seafaring expeditions that mapped the Pacific archipelagos and the coasts...

by Richard Obousy As project leader for Project Icarus, the ambitious successor to the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus starship design, Richard Obousy is deeply engaged with the advanced propulsion community. Here he gives us a report on the recent Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop, which he attended in November. It was a sizable gathering, but Richard focuses here on work of particular relevance to Project Icarus and the Tau Zero Foundation, the twin backers of Icarus. Recently, several members of the Project Icarus team attended the 2010 Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop (ASPW) at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. The event ran from from Monday, November 15 through Wednesday, November 17, with over sixty presentations given by a number of researchers. Project Icarus attendees included James French, Rob Adams, Robert Freeland, Andreas Tziolas and myself. The ASPW is focused on low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) concepts ranging from TRL 1 to 3. A...

Various accounts of what happened to Japan's Akatsuki Venus orbiter continue to come in, but it seems clear that the craft failed to achieve orbit. Sky & Telescope has been keeping a close eye on things and reports that errant thruster firings evidently caused an unexpected rotation that resulted in an on-board computer putting the vehicle into standby mode. The result: Too short a burn to ensure orbital capture, with Akatsuki now in a solar orbit that won't take it back to Venus for another seven years. Are course changes possible for another go then? We'll see. Supply, Demand and Near-Earth Space In an unaccustomed way, the Venus news has me in an inner system mode this morning, which means it's probably a good time to talk about Dana Andrews' thoughts on supply and demand when it comes to space colonization. Andrews (Andrews Space, Seattle) and colleagues Gordon Woodcock (Space America Inc.) and Brian Bloudek have been putting together a scenario for near-term commercialization of...

Long before I knew what ideas for interstellar flight were out there in the literature, I always saw the idea of a trip between the stars in Homeric terms. It would be an epic journey that, like that of Odysseus, would resonate throughout human history and become the stuff of legend, even myth. In back of all that was the belief that any vehicle we could design that could carry people and not just instruments to the stars would be a 'generation ship,' in which the crew were born, raised their families, lived their lives and died while the ship, moving at maybe 1 percent of light speed, pressed on to destination. That familiar science fiction trope still has a ring of truth about it, because if for some reason we as a species decided we absolutely had to get a few human beings to Alpha Centauri, about the only option we would have for the near-term is a solar sail and a close-pass gravity assist by the Sun, and even in the best case scenario, that still works out to around a thousand...

Is NASA going to start pushing back into the realm of truly innovative ideas? Maybe so, to judge from what Robert Braun continues to say. Braun, who joined the agency in February, is now NASA chief technologist, a recently revived office that coordinates mission-specific technologies at the ten NASA centers. This story in IEEE Spectrum notes that Braun is soliciting 'disruptive technologies' through a series of 'grand challenges.' Most of these relate to short-term space activities such as Earth observation missions, but enhancing robotics and pushing new ideas in space propulsion has obvious implications for deep space operations. From Susan Karlin's story at the IEEE Spectrum site: The grand challenges address three areas: accessing space more routinely, managing space as a natural resource, and future quests. Achieving these goals mostly boils down to improvements in spacecraft propulsion, energy use, and safety; advances in astronaut health, communication technology, and...

It's fascinating to watch the development of online preprint services from curiosity (which is what the arXiv site was when Paul Ginsparg developed it in 1991) to today's e-print options, hosted at Cornell and with mirrors not just at the original Los Alamos National Laboratory site but all around the world. Then, too, the arXiv is changing in character, becoming an early forum for discussion and debate, as witness Ian Crawford's comments on Jean Schneider's Astrobiology paper. We looked at Crawford's criticisms of Schneider yesterday. Today we examine Schneider's response, likewise a preprint, and published online in a fast-paced digital dialogue. Schneider (Paris Observatory) focuses here on nuclear fusion and antimatter by way of making the case that interstellar flight will be a long and incredibly difficult undertaking. A bit of context: Schneider's real point in the original Astrobiology piece wasn't to offer a critique of interstellar flight ideas, but to call attention to the...