Centauri Dreams
Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
SETI: The Artificial Transit Scenario
Among the many memorable things Freeman Dyson has said in a lifetime of research, one that stands out for me is relatively recent. “Look for what is detectable, not for what is probable.” This was Dyson speaking at a TED conference in Monterey, CA back in 2003, making the point that the universe continually surprises us, and by making too many assumptions about what we are looking for, we may miss unexpected things that can advance our understanding. Dyson has been thinking about this for a long time considering that it was way back in 1960 that he first suggested looking for the excess infrared radiation that might flag a distant Dyson sphere.
I would call this an unorthodox approach to SETI in its day except that when he first came up with it, Dyson didn’t have a SETI effort to consider. It was only in the same year that Cornell’s Frank Drake began SETI observations at Green Bank, and a scant year before that that Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi published the seminal paper “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature. SETI in 1960 was a nascent field, but it would soon be focused on radio and, later, optical transmissions. Even so, Dyson’s thinking remains viable and unorthodox SETI efforts continue.
Image: Our Milky Way presents a field full of stars. How to search for signs of an extraterrestrial civilization among the countless targets? Looking for a Dyson sphere is unorthodox, but some scientists are suggesting this and other unusual ways of detecting the macro-engineering of distant civilizations. Image credit: NASA.
Luc Arnold (Aix Marseille Université) runs through the scholarship on what we might call ‘non-traditional’ forms of SETI in a new paper, noting that what he calls Dysonian SETI looks for signatures of macro-engineering projects in space. We’ve discussed many of these here before, delving particularly into the papers of Milan ?irkovi? and Robert Bradbury, but it’s worth recalling that others picked up on Dyson’s ideas earlier, including Carl Sagan and Russell Walker, who concluded as far back as 1966 that Dyson spheres should be detectable but would probably be hard to tell apart from natural objects having the same low temperatures.
In articles like Toward an Interstellar Archaeology, I’ve looked at Richard Carrigan’s searches for macro-engineering, and Luc Arnold reminds me in his new paper that Michael Harris has proposed methods of observing antimatter burning by advanced civilizations. Harris would go on in 2002 to use gamma ray observations in a first attempt to find such a signature. In fact, we can trace non-traditional SETI studies to authors as diverse as Ronald Bracewell, Michael Papagiannis and Robert Freitas, who along with several others Arnold references have followed Dyson’s lead in looking for what is detectable rather than what is probable.
Back to Arnold himself, who proposed in 2005 that transit studies like Kepler and CoRoT should be aware of the possibility of detecting an artificial signal. What the scientist has in mind is a planetary size object that orbits its star, constructed by a civilization as a celestial marker. The idea fits with something Jill Tarter said in 2001: “An advanced technology trying to attract the attention of an emerging technology, such as we are, might do so by producing signals that will be detected within the course of normal astronomical explorations of the cosmos.”
Transmission Methods and the Drake Equation
Arnold’s new paper compares radio wavelengths with laser transmissions and his own idea of artificial transits with respect to the factor L in the celebrated Drake Equation. L is generally considered to refer to the lifetime of a civilization, which obviously limits its ability to transmit a detectable signal. Working out the solid angle over which the transit could be ‘transmitted’ over one year, Arnold arrives at a figure of between 25,000 and 75,000 stars depending on stellar densities, and therefore uses a mean number of targets of 50,000 to set up comparisons between artificial transit ‘messaging’ and the more conventional radio and laser transmission options.
The idea is to examine efficiency as seen from the perspective of a transmitting civilization. A radio transmitter is the best choice for short-term messaging — a brief, highly targeted program of signaling — while lasers would require 102 times more energy. In terms of construction and maintenance, artificial transiting objects are more costly. They become interesting only for extremely long-term thinkers who are using the method to produce attention-getting signals where “…the transmitting time can be very long, possibly much longer than the lifetime on the civilization itself.”
Arnold notes that the shape of a transiting object shows up in the transit light curve, making the detection of an artificial planetary sized object a clear possibility. Weighing the costs and energy required to signal other stars, he concludes that if we make such a detection, it should be interpreted as the message of an old and perhaps defunct civilization. It would demonstrate at least that the lifetime of a technological civilization can be longer than several centuries.
It is also true that large artificial objects may be constructed for purposes other than communication. From the paper:
We may also argue that a civilization wanting to communicate with other beings also may want to leave a trace or an artifact in the galaxy that would survive much longer that the civilization itself. These two civilization behaviours seem not incompatible, but rather naturally linked and complementary, at least from an anthropocentric psychological point of view. But artificial planetary-sized objects may also be built for other technological purposes than communication, like energy gathering for example. Such macro-engineering achievements could be the result of natural technological evolution… making the will or desire of communication only an optional argument.
Arnold’s points are intriguing. SETI by radio and optical methods assumes we are looking for an active civilization. But lasers and radios fall silent when a civilization dies. Meanwhile, large artificial objects that transit their stars could remain indefinitely, markers of a culture that might have flourished billions of years ago and is now gone. The Dysonian approach of looking for macro-engineering thus offers the chance to do the kind of interstellar archaeology Richard Carrigan has championed through his exhaustive efforts. Turning up the signs of an artifact without any presumption of further communication still changes our view of the universe.
Who would construct a vast artificial occulter to send a signal to other stars? Several possibilities come to mind, including the idea that the occulting object might have been constructed for purposes other than being detected by another civilization. It is conceivable, though, that a dying culture would want to leave some trace of its existence. Because we are speculating on the motivations of extraterrestrials, we have no way of knowing. This is why Dyson’s idea of looking for what is detectable continues to resonate. Being surprised by the universe is part of our experience and there is no reason to expect that to change now.
The paper is Arnold, “Transmitting signals over interstellar distances: Three approaches compared in the context of the Drake equation,” accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology (preprint). Thanks to Antonio Tavani for the pointer to this paper.
Into Europa’s Ocean
Europa continues to fascinate us with the possibility of a global ocean some 100 kilometers deep, a vast body containing two to three times the volume of all the liquid water on Earth. The big question has always been how thick the icy crust over this ocean might be, and we’ve looked closely at Richard Greenberg’s analysis, which shows surface features he believes can only be explained by interactions between the surface and the water, making for a thin crust of ice. See Unmasking Europa: Of Ice and Controversy for more, and ponder the prospects of getting some kind of future probe through a thin ice layer to explore the potentially habitable domain below.
Possible interactions between the surface and the ice are considered in a new paper by Mike Brown (Caltech) and Kevin Hand (JPL), one that makes the case that there are two ways of thinking about Europa. One is to see the Jovian moon purely as an ice shell upon which the bombardment of electrons and ions have created a chemical cycle. The other is to see it as a geologically active world with an internal ocean that affects what happens on the surface.
Just how much, in other words, does the chemistry of the internal ocean affect what we see from our spacecraft and telescopes? Brown and Hand now believe they can identify a chemical exchange between the ocean and the surface that we can analyze to learn more about both.
Using data from the Keck instrument on Mauna Kea, the researchers have used adaptive optics and spectroscopy to go far beyond what the instruments on the Galileo probe were able to tell us about Europa’s surface. Turning up in their results is a magnesium sulfate salt called epsomite. Magnesium could not be found on the surface unless it came from the ocean below, meaning that ocean water does make it through onto the surface, while surface materials get into ocean water. Says Brown:
“We now have evidence that Europa’s ocean is not isolated—that the ocean and the surface talk to each other and exchange chemicals. That means that energy might be going into the ocean, which is important in terms of the possibilities for life there. It also means that if you’d like to know what’s in the ocean, you can just go to the surface and scrape some off.”
Image: Based on new evidence from Jupiter’s moon Europa, astronomers hypothesize that chloride salts bubble up from the icy moon’s global liquid ocean and reach the frozen surface where they are bombarded with sulfur from volcanoes on Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io. The new findings propose answers to questions that have been debated since the days of NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. This illustration of Europa (foreground), Jupiter (right) and Io (middle) is an artist’s concept. Credit: NASA/JPL.
Because Europa is tidally locked to Jupiter, the same hemisphere always leads in its orbit around the planet, while the other always trails. The difference between the two is striking: While the leading hemisphere has a yellow tint, the trailing hemisphere is streaked with a red material that has been under study for many years. It is believed that volcanic sulfur from Io accumulates on Europa’s trailing hemisphere, existing there along with a substance other than water ice that Galileo could not identify. Keck’s OH-Suppressing Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph (OSIRIS) turned out to be what was needed to map the distribution of water ice and home in on the other material.
It turns out that both hemispheres contain significant amounts of non-water ice, but on the trailing hemisphere Brown and Hand identified the spectral signature of magnesium sulfate. Interestingly, the magnesium sulfate does not itself appear to come from the ocean. Because it only appears on Europa’s trailing side, where Io’s sulfur is accumulating, the researchers surmise there is a magnesium-bearing mineral — probably magnesium chloride — everywhere on the moon that produces magnesium sulfate in the presence of sulfur. The same magnesium chloride might then make up the non-water ice detected on the leading hemisphere.
Europa’s ocean can be rich in sulfate or rich in chlorine, but Brown and Hand rule out a sulfate-rich ocean because magnesium sulfate only appears on the trailing hemisphere. This fits with other work Brown has done on Europa’s atmosphere, which identified atomic sodium and potassium as constituents. The researchers believe that sodium and potassium chlorides consistent with this atmosphere are the dominant salts on the surface of Europa. Their conclusion is that Europa’s is a chlorine-rich ocean with sodium and potassium present as chlorides. By this analysis it closely resembles Earth’s oceans. “If you could go swim down in the ocean of Europa and taste it, it would just taste like normal old salt,” Brown adds.
The paper is Brown and Hand, “Salts and radiation products on the surface of Europa,” in press at the Astrophysical Journal (preprint). More in this Keck Observatory news release.
A Framework for Interstellar Flight
Those of us who are fascinated with interstellar travel would love to see a probe to another star launched within our lifetime. But maybe we’re in the position of would be flyers in the 17th Century. They could see birds wheeling above them and speculate on how humans might create artificial wings, but powered flight was still centuries ahead. Let’s hope that’s not the case with interstellar flight, but in the absence of any way of knowing, let’s continue to attack the foundational problems one by one in hopes of building up the needed technologies.
Marc Millis, who ran NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project at the end of the 20th Century, always points out in his talks that picking this or that propulsion technology as the ‘only’ way to get to the stars is grossly premature. In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Antony Funnell, Millis joined physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford, Icarus Interstellar president Richard Obousy and astronomer and astrobiologist Ian Crawford in a discussion of the matter. Asked where we stood with nuclear fusion, Millis said this:
At this point it is really too soon to pick any favourites because…well, let me put it to you this way; in three different studies, one done by looking at the amount of energy available, one done by financing and one done by technology, all of them came in that there is still going to be about two centuries before we could do a serious interstellar flight. So even if you pulled off the technology for a fusion rocket, to develop the infrastructure to mine enough helium-3 to fuel it, it’s still going to take a very long time. In other words, you could make the technology but to have the amount of energy to put into it takes even longer than developing the technology.
We had much the same discussion at the 100 Year Starship symposium last year in Houston, where a backer of the project from the business world asked why an interstellar mission would be so expensive. The answer simply comes down to the amount of money it takes to create the energy needed to push a payload to the kind of speeds we’re talking about. Given all that, we continue to study everything from beam-driven sails to antimatter-induced fusion and the whole boatload of possibilities in between, hoping to find more efficient ways to drive the starship.
Image: High-intensity lasers produce particle/antiparticle pairs from the vacuum, in a concept introduced by Richard Obousy. Credit: Adrian Mann.
Timeframes Short and Long
People differ widely on time-frames — some people get positively passionate about them — but my own view is that working toward the interstellar goal is just as valuable for me if it happens three centuries from now than if it happens by 2100. I’m no seer and the few times I’ve tried to predict the future, I’ve been humbled by how surprisingly an ‘obvious’ outcome can change. I’m also reminded of what Richard Obousy often tells his own audiences, that humans tend to overestimate what they can do in the short run and underestimate what they can do over longer periods. So maybe interstellar flight is going to happen sooner than I think. Either way, I’ll keep on writing about the topic in hopes of encouraging research and public involvement.
Whenever interstellar flight comes, assuming it does, we’ll all do better by looking out for our planet in timeframes of centuries rather than years or even decades. Gregory Benford told Funnell that the reason we fall into short-term thinking traps is that we live in a tightly defined environment, one in which the great age of physical exploration on our planet is long past. Moving out into the Solar System and ultimately beyond it in search of resources may once again instill a longer-term view as we seek out elements like helium-3 that fusion reactors will demand.
New human societies should emerge from all that as we move toward the construction of an economy throughout the system. Let me quote Benford on this from the interview, in a section where he’s asked about the 100 Year Starship project and the choice of the time frame. A century may be a symbolic goal, but the act of choosing goals is itself part of the process.:
The expansion of the United States into the West began roughly around 1850 and within a century was accomplished, largely through railroads and use of coal for power. But it went on to new heights, we invented the aeroplane, and a century later we already had intercontinental air flight commonly available. It’s this kind of building upon a model that makes star flight a proper goal for the development of the inter-planetary economy that we believe is coming, and therefore sets a goal; 100 years from now let’s see if we can build a starship, and what does it look like, and is it manned or unmanned or robotic or does it have artificial intelligence aboard? Those are secondary issues. The main thing is let’s have a goal and let’s build toward it.
Thus the method: Create a concrete goal and discover a way to reach it. Benford told Funnell that prosperity grows out of these efforts because the structure is being built every step of the way. I’m also reminded here of the ‘horizon mission methodology’ that NASA has found useful in stimulating thinking in its conferences — John Anderson described this in a 1996 JBIS paper. The idea here is to present a problem that is at present impossible to solve. The team then sets about defining what breakthroughs will be needed if this problem is ever to be conquered.
The Dangers of Presumption
Defining the goal and setting the target is the beginning of the process. This is one reason for the original Project Daedalus, which set out to examine the question of whether an interstellar vessel was even possible. The reasoning was that if a culture at our own level of technological development could identify a conceivable way to reach another star, then future breakthroughs should make the job that much more realistic. No one seriously planned to send a 50,000 ton vehicle to Barnard’s Star, but the project proved, way back in the 1970s, that designs that did not violate known physics could be contemplated. Project Icarus now refines the Daedalus model.
Former astronaut Mae Jemison, who heads up the 100 Year Starship initiative, put the matter this way in her conversation with Funnell:
One of the biggest challenges is, again, to keep people from trying to design every step of the way right now, because we don’t know. And as soon as you start saying ‘I know the answer right now’, then you’re probably going to cut off other avenues. There is something that I would say when you talk about how daunting this is and whether or not people say that it’s not possible. It’s a term that I first heard associated with movies, and that term is ‘suspending disbelief’. At some point in time we have to do move forward by suspending disbelief.
Jemison is not talking about suspending disbelief in known physics, of course. What she’s saying is that setting the goal and collecting the wide range of options is how the process begins, and if we succumb to assumptions — from ‘interstellar flight is impossible’ to ‘there’s only one way to do it, my way’ — then we’re not honoring the need for lengthy and challenging research that’s ahead. Personally, I find this notion invigorating. We are beginning to realize through our exoplanet research that Earth-like planets may be out there in the billions. We now engage scientists and engineers in the great work of studying the options that may one day put a human-made payload into another solar system. Humans themselves may eventually make the journey if we are wise enough to make the foundations of this enterprise deep, strong and true.
Interstellar Ice Grains and Life’s Precursors
One of the first science fiction novels I ever read was The Black Cloud, by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. I remember that one of my classmates had smuggled it into our grade school and soon we were passing it around covertly instead of reading whatever it was we had been assigned. In Hoyle’s novel, scientists discover that the cloud, which approaches the Solar System and decelerates, may be a life-form with which they can communicate. My young self was utterly absorbed by this book and I suspect it will hold up well to re-reading.
What brings The Black Cloud to mind is recent work using data from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, where scientists have been studying an enormous gas cloud some 25,000 light years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way in the star forming region Sagittarius B2(N). This cloud is not, of course, behaving as entertainingly as Hoyle’s, but it’s offering up information about how interstellar molecules that are intermediate steps toward the final chemical processes that lead to biological molecules can form in space.
Although we’ve found interesting molecules in interstellar gas clouds before, the new work suggests that the chemical formation sequences for these molecules actually occurred on the surface of icy grains in interstellar space. One of the molecules is cyanomethanimine, which scientists believe is part of the process that produces adenine, one of four nucleobases forming the ‘rungs’ in the DNA lattice. The other is ethanamine, thought to play a similar role in the formation of alanine, one of twenty amino acids in the genetic code.
The biological interest is the suggestion that life’s building blocks are widely available, as noted in one of the two papers on this work:
One important goal of the field of astrobiology is the identification of chemical synthesis routes for the production of molecules important in the development of life that are consistent with the chemical inventory and physical conditions on newly formed planets. One mechanism for seeding planets with chemical precursors is delivery by outer solar system bodies, like comets or meteorites… These objects can be chemical reservoirs for the molecules produced in the interstellar medium during star and planet formation. The chemical inventory of these objects includes the molecules that are directly incorporated from the interstellar medium and molecules subsequently formed by chemical processing of the interstellar species…
What we’re after, then, is an understanding of the process by which interstellar molecules can undergo further change relevant to the formation of life. The paper continues:
This subsequent chemical processing can synthesize larger, more complex molecules that are more directly relevant to prebiotic chemistry from the simpler molecules that can be formed in the interstellar medium. The identification of molecules in the interstellar medium is a key step in understanding the chemical evolution from simple molecular species to molecules of biological relevance and radio astronomy has played the dominant role in identifying the chemical inventory of the interstellar medium…
Image (click to enlarge): The Green Bank Telescope and some of the molecules it has discovered. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
The region under study, Sgr B2(N), turns out to be incredibly rich for this kind of work. According to the scientists, about half of the 170 molecules that have been detected in space were first found in this region. The team was able to measure the characteristic radio emission signatures of the rotational states of cosmic chemicals, using radio emission studies of cyanomethanimine and ethanamine and comparing these to the data generated by the Green Bank Telescope. “Finding these molecules in an interstellar gas cloud means that important building blocks for DNA and amino acids can ‘seed’ newly-formed planets with the chemical precursors for life,” says Anthony Remijan, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
The papers are Loomis et al., “The Detection of Interstellar Ethanimine (CH3CHNH) from Observations taken during the GBT PRIMOS Survey,” accepted in Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint) and Zaleski et al., “Detection of E-cyanomethanimine towards Sagittarius B2(N) in the Green Bank Telescope PRIMOS Survey,” also accepted at Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint). See this NRAO news release for more.
Icarus Interstellar – A Grass Roots Community
One of the pleasures of conferences like the recent Huntsville gathering is the chance to meet up with old friends. Richard Obousy and I had been talking about his offering a review of Icarus Interstellar’s recent work for some time, and Huntsville gave us the chance to firm up the idea. The article below is the result, an examination of the Icarus team’s current structure and planning as they continue with the Project Icarus starship design and look toward other interstellar possibilities. The president and senior scientist for Icarus, Richard is a familiar face on Centauri Dreams. He did his doctoral work at Baylor University, studying the possibility that dark energy could be an artifact of Casimir energy in extra dimensions. He’s now engaged in planning the Icarus conference this summer, about which more shortly.
By Richard Obousy
Having served as President of Icarus Interstellar for 18 months now, I’ve been privileged to be knee deep in the evolving face of this exciting organization. I’ve been promising Paul an article since last September and I’ve realized that much of my procrastination has been founded on not quite knowing how and where to start.
Perhaps the easiest place to begin is to discuss very broadly our organizational structure, and to then talk about some of the elements of that structure to bring clarity to our activities. Icarus Interstellar is a 501(c)(3) US tax exempt non-profit organization with a mission statement to launch an interstellar probe by 2100. While this is certainly a bold objective, especially considering the arguably slow pace of current space exploration activities, I believe it’s important that we set our objectives high. Setting a date gives us something tangible and measurable to aim for, and we’re ever aware that the clock is ticking.
Icarus Interstellar is organized around four Committees, which serve as ‘bins’, for lack of a more endearing term, for certain projects and programs. In my mind, the nucleus of the organization is the Research Committee, which houses several exciting projects which I’ll summarize briefly here.
Project Icarus, Fusion Starship Engineering Study
Project Icarus is an engineering challenge and designer capability exercise to design an unmanned fusion based, interstellar starship capable of exploring a star system within 15 light-years. The total mission duration is limited to a maximum of 100 years from launch. This study started in September 2009 and is being conducted by an international team of volunteer physicists, engineers, and other suitably qualified people.
Research areas are divided into modules encompassing all of the spacecraft systems and problem scope, ranging from Astronomical Target, Primary Propulsion, Power Systems, Science, Communications, Computing, Vehicle Risk and Repair, Technological Maturity and Design Certification. The project is structured into a number of phases and follows a goal directed pathway outlined in the Project Icarus Project Program Document.
Project Icarus has a rotating Project Leader (PL), with the first PL being Kelvin Long, the Project’s Founder. Next, I served as PL, followed by Dr. Andreas Tziolas , Pat Galea and currently Rob Swinney. Project Icarus is responsible for approximately 2/3 of the organization’s 33 peer reviewed papers.
Some fascinating work is coming out of Project Icarus, and we’re pleased to be working with a team at Rutgers university, led by Dr. Haym Benaroya, who are performing thermal and vibration modeling (and ultimately experimentation) of the Daedalus reaction chamber, to help provide insights for Project Icarus. In addition, we have a team at the University of Huntsville, Alabama, who have access to powerful codes and are performing simulations of magnetic nozzles. Milos Stanic recently presented his, and partner Richard Hatcher’s, work at the International Astronomical Congress last year.
Project Forward, Beamed Propulsion Starship Study
Project Forward, led by Dr. Jim Benford, is a parallel study performed by members of Icarus Interstellar and affiliated organizations with expertise in the field of beamed propulsion. The study involves:
1) Analyzing past concepts to see if they are off-optimal, in terms of the recent cost-optimized model, so can be improved. Then quantify such improved sail system concepts.
2) Exploring properties of materials that are being used for solar sails or have been suggested for beam-powered sails to determine their practicality. In particular, studying their properties in several domains of EM (microwave, millimeter wave, laser) to find out what accelerations they are limited to due to heating in the beam.
3) Quantifying an alternate use of sails-deceleration of sail probes from a fusion-powered starship as it approaches stellar systems.
Project Hyperion, Human Interstellar Flight Study
Most studies of interstellar craft focus on vessels that are unmanned. This is because the task of starship construction is considered sufficiently challenging without the additional complexity of creating an environment where humans could survive for decades or even centuries.
Project Hyperion, led by Andreas Hein, tackles this specific challenge head on is performing a preliminary study that defines concepts for a crewed interstellar starship. Major areas of study include propulsion, environmental control, life support, social studies related to crewed multi-decadal/multi-century missions, habitat studies, communications, psychology of deep spaceflight, mission objectives, and the ethics of sending humans to the stars.
Like with all complex system developments, a major challenge is to merge the results from the domain-specific sub studies into a coherent system design. This is being accomplished by using up-to-date systems engineering approaches like concurrent engineering and model-based systems engineering.
Project Persephone, Living Architectures for Worldships
Project Persephone, led by TED Fellow Dr. Rachel Armstrong is considering the application of living technologies such a protocells and programmable smart chemistries, in the context of habitable starship architecture that can respond and evolve according to the needs of its inhabitants.
This project has direct relevance to the challenges of the 21-century where our megacities & urban environments will grow at astonishing rates. Yet the building industry, utilities and energy companies necessarily lag behind the physical demands of a growing city and where inflexible infrastructures become inadequate or inappropriate then urban decay sets in with crime, homelessness, waste & resource management issues, traffic congestion etc. A habitable long duration starship will need evolvable environments that not only use resources efficiently but can respond quickly to the needs of populations and bypass the current necessary time lags that are implicit in the current system – in identifying critical upgrades and then activating industrial supply and procurement chains – which are already playing catch-up by the time they are realized.
Project Bifrost. Emerging Nuclear Space Technologies Project
The Icarus NST Program led by Tabitha Smith has the long-term goals of tangible NST deliverables such as (1) The creation of RTGs, (2) Creation of Nuclear Engines (Thermal and/or Electric) and (3) Partnership with the US Government for Pulsed Nuclear Propulsion use for Starship.
The Helius Experiment, Experimental Starship Systems Research
The Helius Experiment, led by Rob Swinney, has the objective of conducting small scale experimental research on systems integral to the development of interstellar spacecraft. Some specific objectives are to develop engineering designs and small scale pulsed propulsion prototypes, optical systems used in beamed propulsion, radiators and other heat rejection methods simulating the rejection of megawatt power systems to be used for interstellar travel.
Project Tin Tin, Interstellar NanoSat Research and Development
Tin Tin, led by Dr. Andreas Tziolas, is conducting design, research and experimental studies relating to the use of nanosats for interstellar exploration, including modular interstellar systems testing. Project Tin Tin is a collaborative effort between the Kickstart program, Team Phoenicia, The British Interplanetary Society and Icarus Interstellar.
Small satellite technologies developed in response to the NASA Centennial Challenge and Google Lunar X-Prize have sent space mission research teams around the world back to the drawing board. One of the conclusions of a tangent study was the viability of an interstellar nanosat mission, which is currently under design as Icarus Interstellar’s first interstellar mission.
The TinTin baseline will consist of KickSat, CubeSat frames modified to include cameras (IR/spectrometer), a deep space science (dust, gas analyzer, magnetometer, etc) and deep space communication package.
X-Physics Propulsion & Power Project (XP4)
XP4, led by myself, is a group organized to explore deep future propulsion and energy generation concepts including, but not limited to, the manipulation of spacetime (warp drive/wormhole metrics) and the exploration of the quantum vacuum as a possible energy source.
Longshot II, Student Research Project
Longshot II, led by students Divya Shankar and Tiffany Frierson is a revisit of the 1987 Project Longshot unmanned interstellar probe mission conducted by NASA sponsored summer graduate students. Our Icarus Interstellar student designers are currently revisiting the project, correcting mistakes, incorporating omissions and updating the technology to the current state of the art.
Broader Activities
These ten project form the core of Icarus Interstellar. As a 100% volunteer organization we rely on the initiative and dedication of unpaid members so the productivity of the group typically rises and falls in relation to how busy people’s ‘days jobs’ are keeping them. With that said, I’ve been thrilled with the progress that each of these projects is making and amazed at just how much measurable work comes from a relatively small core of dedicated enthusiasts.
Another key committee within the organization is the Public Outreach Committee, which covers anything and everything relating to how Icarus Interstellar interacts with the world at large. This includes the development of our website with ongoing help from Student Designer Tiffany Frierson and Director Robert Freeland, the growth of our public blog, the creation of articles specifically written for high traffic media outlets – we’ve had a long and positive relationship with Discovery Space News for a number of years now for example. We’ve also dabbled in “interstellar art” and I’ve been working with a local Texas based artist in the creation of pieces specifically intended to be inspirational, with a strong interstellar theme.
The Public Outreach Committee is also responsible for the creation of video interviews with team members. These have been conducted by Hailey Bright and Sheila Kanani, who both conduct 5-15 minute interviews, quizzing team members as to their research and their role within the organization. I feel that these are important as they help to put a face to the names and allow people who are interested in our activities a glimpse at those of us involved directly in the programs.
I personally feel strongly about Icarus Interstellar placing strong emphasis on outreach. I taught physics for nearly seven years while working on my PhD, then at a local community college for a year after I finished graduate school. While I was often amazed at how bright some of my students were, I was also stunned at the general ignorance regarding the typical student’s understanding of our place in the universe, and a lack of awareness of how advanced we are (or not) technologically in the context of interstellar flight. The impression I received is that many students consider spaceflight routine and easy, when in fact it is far from it. I also found the distinction between science fiction and science fact blurred, in all too many students’ minds. Thus, I believe it important that we articulate the vision that many of us share relating to humanities exploration of the stars, and that we reliably convey the vast and undeniable challenges associated with this sort of endeavor.
Image: An artist’s conception of a possible Icarus design. Credit: Adrian Mann.
Another active area for Icarus Interstellar is the Fund Development Committee, led by Director Bill Cress. This committee explores ways in which we can generate funds to help the organization grow. Sadly, the field of interstellar flight is not the most resource rich of communities, so we are left to our own devices to figure out how to actually generate money. This is important for a range of things, starting at simple administrative matters like website hosting and basic accounting extending up to reimbursing team members for representing Icarus Interstellar at conferences. While the volunteer work from our team members is astounding, I’m not convinced that a 100% volunteer effort is sustainable for long periods. I’m also not convinced that relying on governments, or philanthropic organizations to generate resources for this endeavor is reliable, so I believe that it’s important nurture an entrepreneurial spirit in Icarus Interstellar.
One example of a recent program that has proved successful is the Icarus Interstellar Affinity Card Program pioneered by Director Robert Freeland. In this program, US based individuals can sign up for a special credit card with starship designs on the front of the card created by the interstellar art luminary Adrian Mann. Icarus Interstellar receives a 1-2% cash donation from Capital One Bank on everything spent on these cards, so given enough people that sign up for this program, a small but constant revenue stream is generated for the organization. I personally signed up for one of these cards the day the program went live, and make all my day to day purchases on it, paying it off in full at the end of the month. This is one of many examples where our community can embrace entrepreneurship to help move us forward to our common goal.
Lastly, we have the Educational Committee chaired by Vice President Andreas Tziolas. This committee focuses on all aspects relating to educating the next generation of starship engineers. Andreas has also been working on his “Starflight Academy” concept, detailing a series of technical courses that could be taught at university level. The hope is that if we can either launch this ourselves — or through a university as an affiliated program — then we can help garner interest in the field of ‘Interstellar Research” as a tangible subject that can be studied at an advanced level. Andreas’s ideas can be read about in the latest issue of JBIS (Vol 65, No 9/10) with his paper titled “Starflight Academy: Education in Interstellar Engineering”.
Icarus Interstellar is still a young organization, not quite two years old (though our flagship Project Icarus is two years older). In this short time we’ve gathered a lot of momentum, and are garnering interest from all corners of the globe. I frequently receive emails from people interested in getting involved with our efforts. I think that the biggest challenge we face over the coming months, and beyond, is to figure out how to best organize and direct the efforts of volunteers who wish to contribute. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to task people with non-traditional backgrounds in a way that’s valuable both to them, and to the interstellar community. While there’s plenty of work to be done on the science and the engineering front, I think it’s important we learn how to welcome the interests of people who come from more varied backgrounds.
For example, some months ago I started working with a bright chap named Steve Summerford. Steve comes from an Urban Planning background, something you wouldn’t typically associated with starship engineering. However, I thought that there would be fantastic potential tasking Steve with work relating to designing interstellar colonies, and exploring facets of planning Worldships – huge and slow moving interstellar vessels designed to take many generations to reach their target. After just a few months work, Steve came up with a wonderful paper titled “Colonized Interstellar Vessel: Conceptual Master Planning“, with publication accepted for JBIS. He also adapted this paper into a popular science article called “What Would an Interstellar ‘Worldship’ Look Like?” which was published on Discovery Space News. The research proposes a new type of worldship design, which adds to the current worldship portfolio of the O’Neill cylinder, the Bernal Sphere, and the Stanford Torus. This type of research demonstrates that non-traditional “interstellar disciplines” – in this case Urban Planning, has much of substance to offer the community.
Another case of working with non-traditional disciplines is the example of Josh Reiger, a young man in his early 20s from San Antonio Texas. Joshua is a construction worker, with a strong passion for interstellar research and astronomy. While most may have simply ignored his email, or found an excuse not to engage with him, I felt that there had to be something that someone with a lot of passion could direct their efforts. After several back and forth emails I decided to get Joshua working on a wiki-style ‘how to’ guide for amateur astronomers interested in learning how to detect signatures of exoplanets. While this is no easy task, there is no reason why a well organized global team of volunteers cannot pool their resources and participate in this fascinating venture. Josh’s work is “in progress” however he’s already created for the Icarus blog a fairly extensive first pass which can be read on the article “Exoplanet Detection and the Amateur Astronomer“.
While I think it’s important to emphasize that most of the work performed by the Icarus Interstellar team to date does follow a typical physics/engineering theme, as can be seen from our publications page, I think these last two examples showcase my own personal ambition to find a way to galvanize as large a cross section of the planet as possible to help us move toward becoming an interstellar species. And, while we’re some way off, I believe that everyone can play a role, no matter how big or small. It’s just up to people like you and I, who read Centauri Dreams, to figure out creative ways to engage with the rest of the world.
This article is really just a glimpse at our multifaceted organization. I’m tempted to write more, but am cognizant of just how long this article is getting. Please drop me an email at info@icarusinterstellar.org if you’re interested in helping Icarus Interstellar in some way, shape, or form or would just like to learn more about us.
Mars Flyby: Daring to Venture
Existential risks, as discussed here yesterday, seem to be all around us, from the dangers of large impactors to technologies running out of control and super-volcanoes that can cripple our civilization. We humans tend to defer thinking on large-scale risks while tightly focusing on personal risk. Even the recent events near Chelyabinsk, while highlighting the potential danger of falling objects, also produced a lot of fatalistic commentary, on the lines of ‘if it’s going to happen, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Some media outlets did better than others with this.
Risk to individuals is understandably more vivid. When Apollo 8 left Earth orbit for the Moon in 1968, the sense of danger was palpable. After all, these astronauts were leaving an orbital regime that we were beginning to understand and were, by the hour, widening the distance between themselves and our planet. But even Apollo 8 operated within a sequenced framework of events. Through Mercury to Gemini and Apollo, we were building technologies one step at a time that all led to a common goal. No one denied the dangers faced by every crew that eventually went to the Moon, but technologies were being tested and refined as the missions continued.
Inspiration Mars is proposing something that on balance feels different. As described in yesterday’s news conference (see Millionaire plans to send couple to Mars in 2018. Is that realistic? for more), the mission would be a flyby, using a free return trajectory rather than braking into Martian orbit. The trip would last 501 days and would be undertaken by a man and a woman, probably a middle-aged married couple. Jonathan Clark, formerly of NASA and now chief medical officer for Inspiration Mars, addresses the question of risk head-on: “The real issue here is understanding the risk in an informed capacity – the crew would understand that, the team supporting them would understand that.” Multi-millionaire Dennis Tito, a one-time space tourist who heads up Inspiration Mars, says the mission will launch in 2018.
Image: A manned Mars flyby may just be doable. But is the 2018 date pushing us too hard? Image credit: NASA/JPL.
We’ll hear still more about all this when the results of a mission-feasibility study are presented next weekend at the 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference in Montana. Given the questions raised by pushing a schedule this tightly, there will be much to consider. Do we have time to create a reliable spacecraft that can offer not only 600 cubic feet of living space but another 600 for cargo, presumably a SpaceX Dragon capsule mated to a Bigelow inflatable module? Are we ready to expose a crew to interplanetary radiation hazards without further experience with the needed shielding strategies? And what of the heat shield and its ability to protect the crew during high-speed re-entry at velocities in the range of 50,000 kilometers per hour?
For that matter, what about Falcon Heavy, the launch vehicle discussed in the feasibility analysis Inspiration Mars has produced for the conference? This is a rocket that has yet to fly.
No, this doesn’t feel much like Apollo 8. It really feels closer to the early days of aviation, when attention converged on crossing the Atlantic non-stop and pilots like Rene Fonck, Richard Byrd, Charles Nungesser and Charles Lindbergh queued up for the attempt. As with Inspiration Mars, these were privately funded attempts, in this case designed to win the Orteig Prize ($25,000), though for the pilots involved it was the accomplishment more than the paycheck that mattered. Given the problems of engine reliability at the time, it took a breakthrough technology — the Wright J-5C Whirlwind engine — to get Lindbergh and subsequent flights across.
Inspiration Mars is looking to sell media rights and sponsorships as part of the fund-raising package for the upcoming mission, which is already being heavily backed by Tito. I’m wondering if there is a breakthrough technology equivalent to the J-5C to help this mission along, because everything I read about it makes it appear suicidal. The 2018 date is forced by a favorable alignment between Mars and the Earth that will not recur until 2031, so the haste is understandable. The idea is just the kind of daring, improbable stunt that fires the imagination and forces sudden changes in perspective, and of course I wish it well. But count me a serious skeptic on the question of whether this mission will be ready to fly on the appointed date.
And if it’s not? I like the realism in the concluding remarks of the feasibility study:
A manned Mars free-return mission is a useful precursor mission to other planned Mars missions. It will develop and demonstrate many critical technologies and capabilities needed for manned Mars orbit and landing missions. The technology and other capabilities needed for this mission are needed for any future manned Mars missions. Investments in pursuing this development now would not be wasted even if this mission were to miss its launch date.
Exactly so, and there would be much development in the interim. The study goes on:
Although the next opportunity after this mission wouldn’t be for about another 13 years, any subsequent manned Mars mission would benefit from the ECLSS [Environmental Control and Life Support System], TPS [Thermal Protection System], and other preparation done for this mission. In fact, often by developing technology early lessons are learned that can reduce overall program costs. Working on this mission will also be a means to train the skilled workforce needed for the future manned Mars missions.
These are all good reasons for proceeding, leaving the 2018 date as a high-risk, long-shot option. While Inspiration Mars talks to potential partners in the aerospace industry and moves ahead with an eye on adapting near-Earth technologies for the mission, a whiff of the old space race is in the air. “If we don’t fly in 2018, the next low-hanging fruit is in ’31. We’d better have our crew trained to recognize other flags,” Tito is saying. “They’re going to be out there.”
In 1968, faced with a deadline within the decade, NASA had to make a decision on risk that was monumental — Dennis Tito reminded us at the news conference that Apollo 8 came only a year after the first test launch of the Saturn 5. Can 2018 become as tangible a deadline as 1970 was for a nation obsessed with a Moon landing before that year? If so, the technologies just might be ready, and someone is going to have to make a white-knuckle decision about the lives of two astronauts. If Inspiration Mars can get us to that point, that decision won’t come easy, but whoever makes it may want to keep the words of Seneca in mind: “It is not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It is because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”
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