Robert Bussard first wrote up the Interstellar Ramjet in 1960 – 52 years ago now. Scooping up one’s fuel whilst en route makes possible high levels of time-compression thanks to relativity. The typical flightpath would be roughly as follows… Taking 10 years to Alpha Centauri and about 100 years to reach 40 light-years. “Fast” but

NASA Technical Report… Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion Physics Research Harold White, Paul March, Nehemiah Williams and William O’Neill form the Advanced Propulsion “Eagleworks” which is exploring edge-fo-science concepts, like the Quantum Plasma Thrusters (Q-Thrusters) and Warp-Drives. Very much a neglected field of “just barely what we know” applications of advanced physics to NASA’s mission. The

Three of my Icarus Interstellar colleagues, Kelvin Long, Richard Obousy and Tabitha Smith, are attending the Nuclear & Emerging Technologies for Space conference. Lots of innovative engineering for nuclear power and propulsion – new energy conversion systems that turn radioisotopic heat (usually from Pu-238) into electrical power, and new designs for space-capable fission-reactors. Plus some

The Centauri project: Manned interstellar travel A plan from 1990 for an antimatter powered starship of gargantuan size. The starship is a “terraformed” asteroid, wrapped in a multi-layer artificial “sky”/Whipple Shield. With just ~100 people to start with, the thing must mass multi-million tonnes, all just to be nice and homey for the crew. Are

Feasibility of interstellar travel Spencer & Jaffe, in 1962/3, produced this JPL study which examined the feasibility of interstellar probes, finding there was no physical reason why fusion or fission propelled multi-stage vehicles could not approach the speed of light. With five stages and a mass-ratio of ~240,000, a D-He3 fusion propelled vehicle could reach

Helium-3 Mining Aerostats in the Atmospheres of the Outer Planets Daedalus assumed He3 sourced from Jupiter, but the other three gas giants would be better due to Jupiter’s massive gravity-well. Uranus seems the best choice – as I jokingly put it, He3 from the Gas Mines of Uranus – for accessing this very attractive fusion

Fusion energy for space missions in the 21st Century Norman Schulze’s massive study covers the major options and their state of development as of 1991. 20 years on and his good advice has been largely ignored, not for technical reasons, but because the vision of a long-term interplanetary future seems unpalatable for the powers-that-be. Why?

A planetary system around the nearby M dwarf GJ 667C with at least one super-Earth in its habitable zone. Just 6.97 parsecs away, which is 22.7 light years – a century via a fusion rocket or laser-sail or an episode on “Star Trek”. Given large solar collectors at 0.1 AU from the Sun and the

Sudden Future Singularities (SFS) have been a lively area in cosmology the last few years, hitting the mainstream media as “the Big Rip”, which even featured in a story by Stephen Baxter. Now it seems a pressure-driven SFS might occur in a mere 8.7 million years… http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.6661v1.pdf …Fermi Paradox answer? The ETIs are gathering at