When Greg Matloff's "Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy" appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward's work, and realize that an interstellar community was growing in space agencies, universities and the pages of journals. Since those days, Matloff's contributions to the field have kept coming at a prodigious rate, with valuable papers and books exploring not only how we might reach the stars but what we can do in our own Solar System to ensure a bright future for humanity. In today's essay, Greg looks at interstellar propulsion candidates and ponders the context provided by Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions small sailcraft moving at 20 percent of the speed of light, bound for Proxima Centauri. What can we learn from the effort, and what alternatives should we consider as we ponder the conundrum of interstellar propulsion? by Dr....

Can we use a laser array to get a fast probe to another star? Breakthrough Starshot relies upon the notion, which was first advanced by Robert Forward all the way back in 1962, and subsequently considered by George Marx in 1966, along with hosts of researchers since. With beamed energy we leave the propellant behind, but as we’ve seen in our discussions of deceleration, there remains the problem of slowing down at the target. Breakthrough Starshot assumes a flyby, but the paper we looked at yesterday works out strategies for braking into orbit at the target star. Or more accurately, at the target stars, for multiple systems are assumed. Let’s dig back into that paper today, but first, let me make a brief administrative comment. The upcoming Breakthrough Discuss meeting in Palo Alto (I covered last year’s sessions) occurs at exactly the wrong time for me -- I’m locked into long-standing travel plans elsewhere. While I travel, there will be no Centauri Dreams posts for the rest of this...

Given his key role in the development of sail ideas for interstellar flight, Robert Forward inevitably comes up in any discussion of deep space missions. The late physicist put forward a number of sail concepts and mission ideas, including a laser-driven lightsail to Epsilon Eridani with return capability that would travel at 50 percent of the speed of light. Those were numbers that made a manned mission theoretically possible, though demanding a huge sail (1000 kilometers in diameter) and a mind-bending space-based 75,000 TW laser system. Yesterday we looked at the critical problem of deceleration in a sail-based interstellar mission, with reference to the new paper by René Heller and Michael Hippke. I only wish Forward were here to give us his thoughts on the newly proposed 'photogravitational assist' method of deceleration, because for years his own method for the Epsilon Eridani mission -- a 'staged' sail that separates, so that one sail ring reflects laser light back onto...

Given the distances involved, faster would always seem to be better when it comes to interstellar flight. Voyager, which took 12 years to get to Neptune and roughly 35 years to encounter the heliopause, would take 75,000 years to cross the 4.22 light years to Proxima Centauri. Voyager's 17 kilometers per second clearly doesn't cut it, but how fast can we realistically hope to go? Let's say we manage to build the phased laser array contemplated in the early Breakthrough Starshot discussions. Starshot's researchers contemplate driving small sails to 20 percent of the speed of light, a figure that should allow safe passage through the interstellar medium for a large percentage of the sails sent. But get to Proxima Centauri in 20 years and another problem arises: Each sail blows through the system in mere hours. In fact, at 0.2c, these sails cross a distance equivalent to the Moon's orbit around the Earth in six seconds. Hence the huge problem: How to explore the system we've reached? A...

Nothing built by humans has ever gotten as far from our planet as Voyager 1, which is now almost 21 billion kilometers from Earth. We've talked about the future of both Voyagers before in these pages -- Voyager 1 passes within about 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in some 40,000 years, its closest approach to a neighboring star. Voyager 2, which is now almost 17 billion kilometers out, closes to within 1.7 light years of Ross 248 in the same 40,000 years. My case for doing what Carl Sagan once discussed, giving each Voyager a final kick with its remaining hydrazine, so that those closing distances could be reduced, can be found in Voyager to a Star. It would be a symbolic and philosophical act rather than a scientific one, as both Voyagers are losing their ability to transmit data and will be silent in about a decade. And nothing can reduce those huge timeframes, which means that any such symbolic statement would be made to the future, a way of saying we are learning to be a...

If Breakthrough Starshot can achieve its goal of delivering small silicon chip payloads to Proxima Centauri or other nearby stars, it will be because we've solved any number of daunting problems in the next 30 years. That's the length of time the project's leaders currently sketch out to get the mission designed, built and launched, assuming it survives its current phase of intense scrutiny. The $100 million that currently funds the project will go into several years of feasibility analysis and design to see what is possible. That means scientists will work a wide range of issues, from the huge ground-based array that will propel the payload-bearing sails to the methods of communications each will use to return data to the Earth. Also looming is the matter of how to develop a chip that can act as all-purpose controller for the numerous observations we would like to make in the target system. If the idea of a spacecraft on a chip is familiar, it's doubtless because you've come across...

In early December the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics offered as part of its fall colloquium series a talk by Harvard's Avi Loeb, fortunately captured on YouTube as Project Starshot: Visiting the Nearest Star Within Our Lifetime. We've looked at Breakthrough Starshot in many posts on Centauri Dreams, including my reports from the last set of meetings in Palo Alto, but for those new to the concept of using a laser array to send small, instrumented sails to the Alpha Centauri stars, this video is a fine introduction. You'll recall that yesterday I talked about Robert Austin's futuristic Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope, with an illustration of what such an instrument might see of the exoplanet Gliese 832c. If Starshot can achieve its goals, it will be able to make out continent sized features on the surface of Proxima b, or perhaps a planet around Centauri A or B. It would achieve, in other words, what it would take a near-Earth space-based telescope 300 kilometers wide...

Who knows why and when we're going to remember things? In the bus on the way to Moffett Field for the second morning of the Breakthrough Starshot meetings, I found myself thinking about Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars (1959). I had a paperback edition with a beautiful Richard Powers cover when I was a boy. What haunted me on that drive was the memory of what was written on the back: They built a ship called the Southern Cross and launched her to Alpha Crucis. Centuries passed, civilizations rose and fell, the very races of mankind changed, and still the ship fell on her headlong journey toward the distant star. After ten generations the Southern Cross was the farthest thing from Earth of any human work - but she was still not halfway to her goal. Breakthrough Starshot doesn't plan to take that long to reach one of the Alpha Centauri stars (Alpha Crucis, by the way, is not one of them, but a multiple star system that is a part of the beautiful asterism known as the Southern Cross)....

A lot of things can go wrong when you're working on a thirty-year project. Consider the charter of the systems subcommittee of Breakthrough Starshot, whose mission is to "...ensure that Starshot engineering activities can and will result in a 0.2c mission to Alpha Centauri." In the hands of the capable Kevin Parkin, the subcommittee has oversight over a systems team that will conduct system engineering, modeling and integration activities. I call Parkin 'capable' but, like so many of the people I dealt with at the recent meetings in San Francisco, he strikes me as flat-out brilliant. He's also a strategic thinker who knows how to communicate. Parkin's presentation on how to structure a project as complex as Starshot included classic failure modes of past projects, such as team members working with differing assumptions, a focus on details and not on the whole, and a focus on the whole and not on the details. Any one of these can trip you up. Walk a fine line, in other words, and try...

An interesting typo -- I had started to write 'On the plane back from Proxima b,' still a bit groggy from lack of morning coffee. Let's correct that to 'On the plane back from San Francisco.' I was coming back from the Breakthrough Starshot meetings, most of which took place at Moffett Field, a former naval air station that NASA owns through its adjacent Ames Research Center. Presume no NASA involvement, though -- Moffett Field is used by many and includes three university branch campuses as well as the building leased by Breakthrough Starshot. My plan had been to settle in on the plane with my notes as I worked out what to say about the trip. Instead, I succumbed to sleep for a good part of the journey. I had slept well each night, but the meetings were intense and the note-taking non-stop. I arrived two hours after the first of them began in a small boardroom, wedged myself into a chair in the corner after nodding hello to a number of familiar faces, and began taking notes by hand,...

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 propellant and offers a practical way to move large payloads (and crews) around the Solar System. Based in San Francisco, Brian is a technology entrepreneur who doubles as a software/electrical engineer. In the essay below, he looks at the spacecoach in relation to the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, where synergies come into play that may benefit both concepts. by Brian McConnell The spacecoach is a design pattern for a reusable solar electric spacecraft, previously featured on Centauri Dreams here and developed in A Design for a Reusable Water-Based Spacecraft Known as the Spacecoach (Springer Verlag), which I wrote with Alex Tolley. It primarily uses water as its propellant. This design has numerous benefits, chief...

Although the idea of a mission to the Sun's gravitational lens has been in Claudio Maccone's thinking for a long time, it has never been linked with the financial resources of a concept study like Breakthrough Starshot. The Italian physicist led a conference on mission concepts in the early 1990s and submitted a proposal for an ESA mission in 1993. What's striking to me is that throughout that time, Maccone has explored aspects of the mission he calls FOCAL that at one point seemed far too futuristic for our era. Could we, for example, do SETI with a FOCAL mission? Could we use it to enhance communications with an interstellar probe? The answer to both is yes, but the problem was pushing a spacecraft out to 550 AU in the first place, a challenge involving flight times of many decades. Then the Breakthrough Starshot initiative emerged and suddenly Maccone found himself in Palo Alto talking about a well-funded study, one that looked to FOCAL to support interstellar probes both in terms...

Because I get irritable when I don't get my walking in every day, I made sure when I arrived in Palo Alto to cram as much as I could into the day before Breakthrough Discuss began. That meant heading out from the hotel just after noon and putting in about five miles. Palo Alto is a very walkable place and I found myself ambling up and down shady streets past gardens bright with spring flowers. We had superb weather for the entire conference, but naturally when things got going, both days were crammed with talks and long walks were out of the question. But the day before, as I walked, I pondered the schedule of the conference, wondering how a mission to Alpha Centauri fit into the overall plan. In addition to the $100 million going toward Breakthrough Starshot, Breakthrough Initiatives has also put up $100 million for its SETI project, which has already begun operations at Green Bank (West Virginia) and is slated to operate at the Parkes dish in Australia as well, giving SETI the...

Yesterday's announcement of Breakthrough Starshot brought an email from exoplanet hunter Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz), whose work has been an inspiration to me since the early days of Centauri Dreams. One of Greg's new projects, working with Anthony Aguirre (Foundational Questions Institute) and several other colleagues, is a website called Metaculus, which bills itself as "a community dedicated to generating accurate predictions about future real-world events by aggregating the collective wisdom, insight, and intelligence of its participants." In other words, this is a kind of prediction market space for science and tech issues. Breakthrough Starshot fits the bill here exactly, because Metaculus is all about the probability of future events, some of which can be predicted to a high degree, while others are purely a matter of calculated odds. The site is open to all and contains the basic information about its methods, and any logged in user can propose a question for consideration....

Here on Centauri Dreams we often discuss interstellar flight in a long-term context. Will humans ever travel to another star? I've stated my view that if this happens, it will probably take several hundred years before we develop the necessary energy resources to make such a mission fit within the constraints of the world's economy. This, of course, assumes the necessary technological development along the way — not only in propulsion but in closed-loop life support — to make such a mission scientifically plausible. I get a lot of pushback on that because nobody wants to wait that long. But overall, I'm an optimist. I think it will happen. Let's attack the question from another direction, though, and leave human passengers for a later date, as Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives, aided by Stephen Hawking, is doing today in a New York news conference. What if we talk about unmanned missions? What if, in fact, the question is: How soon can we put a scientific payload...

We haven't yet found Planet Nine, but the evidence for its existence is solid enough that we can start thinking about its possibilities as a mission target. That work falls in this essay to Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular whose comments on articles here began not long after I started the site. An active member of the Project Icarus attempt to re-design the 1970s Project Daedalus starship, Adam is also the author of Crowlspace, where his insights are a frequently consulted resource. Today he harkens back to a 1960s science fiction story that has given him notions about a way not only to reach Planet Nine but to establish orbit around it. by Adam Crowl Fritz Leiber is better known for his fantasy and SF-fantasy, but he could write hard-SF too. A fine example is his 1962 story, "The Snowbank Orbit", the title of which alludes to World War II tales of pilots surviving bailouts without parachutes by plunging into snow-drifts. Five spacecraft, racing towards Uranus at 100 miles per...

Like the Marie Celeste, the Leonora Christine is a storied vessel, at least among science fiction readers. In his 1967 story "To Outlive Eternity," expanded into the novel Tau Zero in 1970, Poul Anderson described the starship Leonora Christine's stunning journey as, unable to shut down its runaway engines, it moved ever closer to the speed of light. Just how a real Leonora Christine might cope with the stresses of a ramjet's flight into the interstellar deep is the subject of Al Jackson's latest, which draws on memories not only of Robert Bussard, who invented the interstellar ramscoop concept, but a young scientist named John Ford Fishback. by A. A. Jackson Project Pluto - a program to develop nuclear-powered ramjet engines - must have been on Robert Bussard's mind one morning at breakfast at Los Alamos. Bussard was a project scientist-engineer on the nuclear thermal rocket program Rover -- Bussard and his coauthor DeLauer have the two definitive monographs on nuclear propulsion...

Our second report from the recent Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop is the work of Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne, with an emphasis on the worldship track. Cassidy has an MS from Vanderbilt, where she studied ecology and evolution. She currently works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, doing traditional and next-generation gene and genome sequencing. Her interest in space travel/engineering was enhanced by attending Advanced Space Academy in Huntsville at age 14. Michel Lamontagne is a French-Canadian mechanical engineer, practicing in the fields of heat transfer and ventilation, with a passion for space. An active member of Icarus Interstellar, he tells me he has "been designing spaceships since he was 12 years old, and waiting for reality to catch up!" Photos throughout are from New York photojournalist Joey O'Loughlin, and are used with permission. By Cassidy Cobbs and Michel Lamontagne This year's Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW-2016) was held in...

I always feel that my day starts right when a story involving the Voyagers crosses my desk. The scope, the sheer audacity of these missions in their day cheers me up, and the fact that they are still communicating with us is a continual cause for celebration. With Voyager 1 now moving beyond the heliosphere, we've got an interstellar craft on our hands, one that's telling us a good deal about the perturbed regions through which it moves. Every day that the Voyagers stay alive is a triumph for an inquisitive and exploring species, and one day we'll be launching their successor, targeting the local interstellar medium with instruments designed for the task. Image: This artist's concept shows NASA's Voyager spacecraft against a backdrop of stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. The heliosphere is that 'bubble' blown by the particles of the Sun's solar wind in surrounding interstellar space. As such, it's a moving and malleable thing, flexing, flowing, contracting here, expanding there...

As we close in on perihelion at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the Dawn spacecraft continues its operations at Ceres. The contrast between Dawn's arrival at Ceres in March and New Horizons' flyby of Pluto/Charon could not have been more striking. With Dawn's gentle ion push, we watched Ceres gradually grow in the skies ahead, and then settle into focus as the spacecraft began orbital operations. New Horizons was a thrilling, high-velocity fling, with a sudden transition to a backlit Pluto as we settled in to wait for months of data return. Dawn is now heading for its third science orbit, gradually descending through 1900 kilometers toward an eventual 1500 kilometer altitude above the surface -- this is fully three times closer to Ceres than the previous orbit. Again, the gentle nature of ion propulsion is evident, for the spacecraft will reach the new orbit in mid-August, when data operations and imagery again flow. Bear in mind as you think about Pluto and Ceres that the latter is...