The right kind of atmosphere may keep a planet habitable even if it crowds the inner region of the habitable zone. But atmospheric evolution involves many things, including the kind of geological activity our own planet has experienced, leading to sudden, deep...
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Detecting Early Life on Exoplanets
At the last Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, I was part of a session on biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres that highlighted how careful we have to be before declaring we have found life. Given that, as Alex Tolley points out below, our own planet has been...
The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
Can we use the outflow of particles from the Sun to drive spacecraft, helping us build the Solar System infrastructure we'll one day use as the base for deeper journeys into the cosmos? Jeff Greason, chairman of the board of the Tau Zero Foundation, presented his take...
A Vision to Bootstrap the Solar System Economy
Early probes are one thing, but can we build a continuing presence among the stars, human or robotic? An evolutionary treatment of starflight sees it growing from a steadily expanding presence right here in our Solar System, the kind of infrastructure Alex Tolley...
A Near-Term Commercial Asteroid Mining Mission
Most readers will recall the Spacecoach, developed by Brian McConnell and Alex Tolley and widely discussed in these pages. A workhorse spacecraft designed to shuttle crew and cargo between Earth and nearby planets, the Spacecoach was presented as a way to open up...
SETI: A Networked Galaxy?
We often conceive of SETI scenarios in which Earth scientists pick up a beacon-like signal from another star, obviously intended to arouse our attention and provide information. But numerous other possibilities exist. Might we, for example, pick up signs of another...
Ceres Up Close (and a Bit of Bradbury)
I know I'm going to remember the summer of 2015 for a long time. The confluence of deep space missions has brought new images every week, including the latest view of Ceres and its enigmatic bright spots, which appears below. I'm already bracing myself for that...
A Stagecoach to the Stars
Imagine the kind of spaceship we'll need as we begin to expand the human presence into the nearby Solar System. We'd like something completely reusable, a vessel able to carry people in relative comfort everywhere from Mars to Venus, and perhaps as far out as the...
Spaceward Ho!
How do you go about creating a straightforward, highly durable design for a spacecraft, one that is readily refuelable and offers manifest advantages for crew comfort and safety? Alex Tolley and Brian McConnell have been asking that question for some time now, coming...