The Official Announcement has arrived… Mae Jemison and Team Establish 100 Year Starship With Goal to Make Interstellar Space Travel Reality by 2112 …also covered by Paul Gilster, at “Centauri Dreams”,… 100 Year Starship Organization Launches …while Sharon Weinberger writes it up for the BBC’s International front page news… 100-Year Starship: Mae Jemison reaches for

Recently this website, Build the Enterprise, hit the news because of the author’s rather quixotic call to build a real interplanetary version of that most famous fictional starship lineage. Unfortunately the site’s Forum-ware is very cantankerous, so I posting my discussion of necessary redesigning of the concept (slightly reworded for clarity)… Running the numbers, the

Heaven is a planet 80 times bigger than Earth! Or so the late Percy Collett revealed to the world. For years I’ve had a vague memory about a Missionary with a story about a trip to Heaven. Thanks to the wonders of Google I tracked it down – he visited Australia in 1989, on a

A comment on Transterrestrial Musings suggested I might be against space development. A quick browse through my earlier blog-posts would quickly correct such a misapprehension. What I was arguing was the race to bust up planets to make cybernetic “Islands of the Lotus-Eaters” might be as much a trap and a dead-end as the Luddite

A worthwhile predecessor to my present musings is the 1996 efforts by Kelly Starks & the gang at the Lunar Institute of Technology. As you’ll note the “updates” have lagged somewhat, but the Starship Design Study is well worth a look. They went into a lot of detail and their discussion of drive technology, life-support,

George Dvorsky recently blogged on the easy way to boot-strap civilisation into Kardashev Type II status. For those new to the Kardashev Civilisation levels, Type I uses the energy received by its planet – humans use and control about 0.01% of that presently. Type II uses and controls the energy output equivalent to its star’s

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has reported, after studying nearby red-dwarfs, that ~40% (range 28%-95%) have Super-Earth planets in their habitable zones, which is quite remarkable considering how small a red-dwarf’s habitable zone is (from 0.25 AU and smaller.) That means 80% of the stars in our Galaxy – at least our bit of it

From Ctrl+Alt+Del Comic…

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