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If NASA greenlights this interstellar mission, it could last 100 years

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The Voyager spacecraft have ventured far outside our solar system. Now a team of scientists is hoping to take the next interstellar mission even farther. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

The Voyager spacecraft have ventured far outside our solar system. Now a team of scientists is hoping to take the next interstellar mission even farther.

NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, have been traveling for so long that they've left our solar system. Amazingly, these venerable probes still talk to Earth, but their plutonium-powered energy supply is getting ever closer to running out.

That's why NASA asked a team of scientists and engineers to come up with a successor mission that could pick up where the Voyagers left off. The group, which will finish a report on their work within weeks, has designed a practical, doable spacecraft that could go faster than the Voyagers and much farther out into interstellar space.

A mission to last a century — or more

If NASA decides to build this probe, it could launch in 2036 and boldly venture forth for a minimum of 50 years and possibly more than a century. That means it would have the longest planned duration of any NASA mission, by a long shot.

Agency officials would have to cope with all of its technology inevitably going obsolete — to say nothing of all the people involved in the mission getting older and dying.

"It's always hard to talk about transition plans," says Ralph McNutt of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who leads the team working on this proposed mission. "Typically, it hasn't really been happening in most space missions. But on this one, it's going to be front and center."

McNutt, who is about to turn 68 years old, thinks he's the youngest member of the Voyager science team who has been on it since the spacecraft launched. Some of the scientists originally involved with Voyager "did indeed pass away," he says. "Some of those transitions were a little bit rough."

No one could have known that the Voyager spacecraft would last so long; they originally were built to survive for only about five years, so that they could visit Jupiter and Saturn. But the hardware kept working, and so NASA added on flybys of Uranus and Neptune.

And still the plucky spacecraft continued on, faithfully reporting back to Earth. Each made history by leaving the bubble around the sun that's considered the boundary of the solar system, crossing into the unexplored space between stars.

"We're just flat running out of power"

Scientists who weren't even born when the Voyagers launched, like 25-year-old Stella Ocker , a graduate student at Cornell University, now depend on data that the Voyager probes send back as they move through this uncharted territory.

Voyager 1 is now more than 14 billion miles away , and Voyager 2 is more than 11 billion miles away. To the casual observer, it would look like they're moving through black nothingness, but Ocker says that's not exactly true.

"The interstellar medium seems like it's empty, but it's really not," says Ocker. "It's full of gas and dust and cosmic rays, energetic particles."

When it comes to understanding this part of the universe, she says, "there's still huge gaps in our knowledge that can really only be filled by direct sampling."

The Voyagers have been doing that and constantly send back information on the density and characteristics of the interstellar gas they're moving through.

But unfortunately, "we're just flat running out of power," says McNutt. The science team has been thinking of clever ways to conserve what's left to keep the Voyagers going for as long as possible. "We're looking at which instrument gets to have their heaters all turned off first."

Current predictions say that the very last instrument might get shut down around 2030 or 2031, he says, assuming nothing breaks before then.

Voyager 1, which took this famous image of Earth as a "pale blue dot," offered a new perspective on our home planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Voyager 1, which took this famous image of Earth as a "pale blue dot," offered a new perspective on our home planet.

Knowing this day would come, a few years ago NASA officials asked McNutt and his colleagues to come up with a plan for a new interstellar mission, so that the legacy of the Voyagers didn't just end.

Their proposed probe relies on technology that's either tried-and-true or already far along in development, with a price tag similar to the recent Parker Solar Probe , which was recently sent hurtling toward the sun at a cost of $1.5 billion.

While other groups have dreamed up interstellar missions in the past or are working on them now, those efforts aren't ready for prime time because they're either incredibly expensive or involve serious engineering challenges, says Michael Paul , who serves as project manager for the interstellar probe study team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

For example, one group called Breakthrough Starshot has an admirable vision of sending out many tiny probes that get pushed forward by powerful lasers, says Paul, but "you and I are probably never going to get to see them operate."

He and his co-workers, in contrast, were determined to devise a pragmatic interstellar mission blueprint for NASA that "wasn't so pie in the sky that it just ended up on people's shelves."

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On its way out of the solar system, this proposed spacecraft could swing by a dwarf planet, similar to the New Horizons mission that made the first visit to Pluto in 2015. Kirby Runyon , also at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, notes that scientists know little about dwarf planets, even though they are the most common kind of planet in the solar system.

"We have a handful of terrestrial planets, and we have a handful of giant planets, but we've got over 130 dwarf planets," says Runyon. He points out that many of these icy bodies may have started out as ocean worlds that might even have been habitable in the past.

Besides visiting some mysterious dwarf planet, the spacecraft would be able to go about twice as fast as Voyager 1 and travel about 375 astronomical units, or over 34 billion miles, within the first 50 years.

McNutt thinks it's entirely plausible that, like the Voyagers, this spacecraft could just keep going and end up more than 800 astronomical units or 74 billion miles away after traveling for a century.

That may sound far, but Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own, is about 25 trillion miles away.

Designing a multigenerational space plan

Still, this tiny step out into interstellar space may help in designing future missions that could actually reach other stars, says Ocker.

"We do need to learn how to conduct missions over these very long timescales if we are ever going to come close to achieving any of the aspirations of interstellar exploration that are so often posed in the popular media," she says.

To help understand how to deal with the intergenerational nature of this proposed mission, the research team reached out to Janet Vertesi , a sociologist with Princeton University who has studied the organizational aspects of other projects in space.

"A lot of NASA missions have this as a happy problem. I mean, the Mars rovers that were supposed to last for 90 days lasted for like 12 years," notes Vertesi, who says it's a different matter to make a coordinated plan for a long-term mission.

The researchers already knew they'd need to stockpile computers and other technical components that might become obsolete, she says. And they knew that at some point, they'd have to pass the baton to the next generation of scientists.

"What they hadn't really considered, and where my expertise came in, was how frequently that has to happen for that to be an expected and normal part of the mission operations and not a major breach or big problem," says Vertesi.

In hospitals, for example, frequent handoffs between shifts mean that doctors and nurses have worked out checklists and other standard procedures to make sure the transition can happen seamlessly. "That's the kind of thing they needed to get good at thinking about and planning for," says Vertesi.

She's led discussions with the researchers to help them sort through this. Astronomer Carey Lisse , who is working on the interstellar probe study, said these sessions were "very blunt and made us think a lot."

He's done the math. "I will be 75 in 2036 when we launch. That means that I know I'm not going to be on this mission probably for more than 10 years after launch," says Lisse, adding that the need for handovers is just a fact. "This isn't just theory or just talk. It's going to happen multiple times, probably two or three times at least."

NASA's Got A New, Big Telescope. It Could Find Hints Of Life On Far-Flung Planets

It's challenging to anticipate how the program will need to change over time, says Paul, and to look forward to "what the demographics of the science community, the engineering community, and the whole world is going to look like, so that this is a program for them, and not for us."

Ocker, who doesn't even have a Ph.D. yet, points out that she'll be late in her career by the time this probe reaches interstellar space, if NASA decides to support it and if it launches in the 2030s. "I'm very hopeful that this mission will happen. I really hope it does, in which case I'll be very excited to use the data when it does eventually come down," she says.

She'd also love for it to carry some kind of contemporary take on the Golden Records , the phonograph albums carried by the Voyager probes to share greetings and Earth sounds with any aliens who might stumble across them out there in interstellar space.

"I don't think we should try to copy the Golden Record," she says, "but I think it would be really amazing to have a similar kind of public outreach piece that plays an important part in the mission."

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These New Technologies Could Make Interstellar Travel Real

Long considered science fiction, leaving the solar system and speeding amid the stars may soon be within reach.

On October 31, 1936, six young tinkerers nicknamed the “Rocket Boys” nearly incinerated themselves in an effort to break free of Earth’s gravity. The group had huddled in a gully in the foothills of California’s San Gabriel Mountains to test a small alcohol-fueled jet engine. They wanted to prove that rocket engines could venture into space, at a time when such ideas were widely met with ridicule. That goal was disrupted when an oxygen line caught fire and thrashed around wildly, shooting flames.

The Rocket Boys’ audacity caught the attention of aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman, who already worked with two of them at Caltech. Not far from the location of their fiery mishap, he established a small test area where the Rocket Boys resumed their experiments. In 1943, the site became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and von Karman its first director. JPL has since grown into a sprawling NASA field center with thousands of employees, yet it has managed to retain its founding motivation: test the limits of exploration, convention be damned.

They’ve had many successes over the years. In the early 1970s, JPL engineers built Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity from the solar system. A few years later, they followed up with Voyagers 1 and 2, the fastest of the many objects aimed at interstellar space. From the beginning of the Space Age to the launch of the Voyager spacecrafts — a span of just two decades — rocket scientists more than doubled flight speeds. But in the decades since, only one more spacecraft has followed the Voyagers out of the solar system, and nothing has done so at such a high speed. Now JPL’s rocketeers are getting restless again, and quietly plotting the next great leap.

The consistent theme of the new efforts is that the solar system is not enough. It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars. John Brophy, a flight engineer at JPL, is developing a novel engine that could accelerate space travel by another factor of 10. Leon Alkalai, a JPL mission architect, is plotting a distant journey that would begin with an improbable, Icarus-esque plunge toward the sun. And JPL research scientist Slava Turyshev has perhaps the wildest idea of all, a space telescope that could provide an intimate look at a far-off Earth-like planet — without actually going there.

These are all long shots (not  entirely  crazy, according to Brophy), but if even one succeeds, the implications will be huge. The Rocket Boys and their ilk helped launch humans as a space-faring species. The current generation at JPL could be the ones to take us interstellar.

Rocket Reactions

For Brophy, inspiration came from Breakthrough Starshot, an extravagantly bold project announced in 2016 by the late Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. The ultimate aim of the project is to build a mile-wide laser array that could blast a miniature spacecraft to 20 percent the speed of light, allowing it to reach the Alpha Centauri star system (our closest stellar neighbor) in just two decades.

Brophy was skeptical but intrigued. Ambitious aspirations are nothing new for him. “JPL encourages people to think outside the box, and my wacky ideas are getting wackier in time,” he says. Even by that standard, the Starshot concept struck him as a little too far from technological reality. But he did begin to wonder if he could take the same concept but scale it down so that it might actually be feasible within our lifetimes.

What especially captivated Brophy was the idea of using a Starshot-style laser beam to help deal with the “rocket equation,” which links the motion of a spacecraft to the amount of propellant it carries. The rocket equation confronts every would-be space explorer with its cruel logic. If you want to go faster, you need more fuel, but more fuel adds mass. More mass means you need even more fuel to haul around that extra weight. That fuel makes the whole thing heavier still, and so on. That’s why it took a 1.4 million-pound rocket to launch the 1,800-pound Voyager probes: The starting weight was almost entirely fuel.

Since his graduate student days in the late 1970s, Brophy has been developing a vastly more efficient type of rocketry known as ion propulsion. An ion engine uses electric power to shoot positively charged atoms (called ions) out of a thruster at high velocity. Each atom provides just a tiny kick, but collectively they can push the rocket to a much greater velocity than a conventional chemical rocket. Better yet, the power needed to run the ion engine can come from solar panels — no heavy onboard fuel tanks or generators required. By squeezing more speed out of less propellant, ion propulsion goes a long way toward taming the rocket equation.

But ion engines come with drawbacks of their own. The farther they get from the sun, the more limited they are by how much electricity their solar panels can generate. You can make the panels huge, but then you add a lot of weight, and the rocket equation slams you again. And ion engines have such gentle thrust that they can’t leave the ground on their own; it then takes them a long time in space to accelerate to their record-breaking speeds. Brophy knows these issues well: He helped design the ion engine aboard NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which just completed an 11-year mission to asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Even with its formidable 65-foot span of solar cells, Dawn went from zero to 60 in an unhurried four days.

Ion the Prize 

While Brophy was pondering this impasse between efficient engines and insufficient solar power, the Breakthrough Starshot concept came out, and it got the gears turning in his head. He wondered: What if you replaced sunshine with a high-intensity laser beam pointed at your spacecraft? Powered by the more efficient laser, your ion engine could run much harder while still saving weight by not having to carry your power source on board.

Two years after his epiphany, Brophy is giving me a tour of an SUV-size test chamber at JPL, where he puts a high-performance ion engine through its paces. His prototype uses lithium ions, which are much lighter than the xenon ions Dawn used, and therefore need less energy to attain higher velocities. It also runs at 6,000 volts compared with Dawn’s 1,000 volts. “The performance of this thing would be very startling if you had the laser to power it up,” he says.

There’s just one minor issue: That laser does not exist. Although he drastically downsized the Starshot concept, Brophy still envisions a 100-megawatt space-based laser system, generating 1,000 times more power than the International Space Station, aimed precisely at a fast-receding spacecraft. “We’re not sure how to do that,” he concedes. It would be by far the biggest off-world engineering project ever undertaken. Once built, though, the array could be used over and over, with different missions, as an all-purpose rocket booster.

As an example, Brophy describes a lithium-ion-powered spacecraft with 300-foot wings of photovoltaic panels powering a full-size version of the engine he is developing at JPL. The laser would bathe the panels in light a hundred times as bright as sunshine, keeping the ion engine running from here to Pluto, about 4 billion miles away. The spacecraft could then coast along on its considerable velocity, racking up another 4 billion miles every year or two.

At that pace, a spacecraft could rapidly explore the dim areas where comets come from, or set off for the as-yet-undiscovered Planet 9, or go ... almost anywhere in the general vicinity of the solar system.

“It’s like we have this shiny new hammer, so I go around looking for new nails to pound in,” Brophy says dreamily. “We have a whole long list of missions that you could do if you could go fast.”

Interstellar Medium Well 

After Brophy’s genial giddiness, it is a shock to talk to Alkalai, in charge of formulating new missions at JPL’s Engineering and Science Directorate. Sitting in his large, glassy office, he seems every bit the no-nonsense administrator, but he, too, is a man with an exploratory vision.

Like Brophy, Alkalai thinks the Breakthrough Starshot people have the right vision, but not enough patience. “We’re nowhere near where we need to be technologically to design a mission to another star,” he says. “So we need to start by taking baby steps.”

Alkalai has a specific step in mind. Although we can’t yet visit another star, we can send a probe to sample the interstellar medium, the sparse gas and dust that flows between the stars.

“I’m very interested in understanding the material outside the solar system. Ultimately, we got created from that. Life originated from those primordial dust clouds,” Alkalai says. “We know that there’s organic materials in it, but what kind? What abundances? Are there water molecules in it? That would be huge to understand.”

The interstellar medium remains poorly understood because we can’t get our hands on it: A constant blast of particles from the sun — the solar wind — pushes it far from Earth. But if we could reach beyond the sun’s influence, to a distance of 20 billion miles (about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun), we could finally examine, for the first time, pristine samples of our home galaxy.

Alkalai wants answers, and he wants to see the results firsthand. He’s 60, so that sets an aggressive schedule — no time to wait for giant space lasers. Instead, he proposes a simpler, albeit still unproven, technology known as a solar thermal rocket. It would carry a large cache of cold liquid hydrogen, protected somehow from the heat of the sun, and execute a shocking dive to within about 1 million miles of the solar surface. At closest approach, the rocket would let the intense solar heat come pouring in, perhaps by jettisoning a shield. The sun’s energy would rapidly vaporize the hydrogen, sending it racing out of a rocket nozzle. The combined push from the escaping hydrogen, and the assist from the sun’s own gravity, would let the ship start its interstellar journey at speeds up to 60 miles per second, faster than any human object yet —and it only gets faster from there.

“It’s very challenging, but we’re modeling the physics now,” Alkalai says. He hopes to begin testing elements of a thermal-rocket system this year, and then develop his concept into a realistic mission that could launch in the next decade or so. It would reach the interstellar medium another decade after that. In addition to sampling our galactic environment, such a probe could examine how the sun interacts with the interstellar medium, study the structure of dust in the solar system and perhaps visit a distant dwarf planet along the way.

It would be a journey, Alkalai says, “like nothing we’ve done in the past.”

Catch A Glimpse 

Solar thermal rockets and laser-ion engines, impressive as they may be, are still absurdly inadequate for crossing the tremendous gulf between our solar system and exoplanets — planets orbiting other stars. In the spirit of the Rocket Boys, Turyshev is not letting absurdity stop him. He is developing a cunning workaround: a  virtual  mission to another star.

Turyshev tells me he wants to send a space telescope to a region known as the solar gravitational lens (SGL). The area begins a daunting 50 billion miles away, though that’s still hundreds of times closer than our closest stellar neighbors. Once you get far enough into the SGL, something marvelous happens. When you look back toward the sun, any object directly behind it appears stretched out, forming a ring, and hugely magnified. That ring is the result of our star’s intense gravity, which warps space like a lens, altering the appearance of the distant object’s light.

If you position yourself correctly within the SGL, the object being magnified from behind the sun could be an intriguing exoplanet. A space telescope floating at the SGL, Turyshev explains, could then maneuver around, sampling different parts of the light ring and reconstructing the snippets of bent light into megapixel snapshots of the planet in question.

I have to interrupt him here. Did he say megapixel, like the resolution you get on your camera phone? Yes, he really is talking about an image measuring 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, good enough to see details smaller than 10 miles wide on a planet up to 100 light-years (600 trillion miles!) away.

“We could peek under the clouds and see continents. We could see weather patterns and topography, which is very exciting,” Turyshev says. He doesn’t mention it, but he doesn’t need to: That kind of resolution could also reveal megacities or other giant artificial structures, should they exist.

Assuming the JPL boffins can solve the transportation issues of getting to the SGL, the mission itself is fairly straightforward, if enormously challenging. Turyshev and his collaborators (Alkalai among them) will need to develop a Hubble-size space telescope,

or a mini-fleet of smaller telescopes, that can survive the 30-year journey. They will need to perfect an onboard artificial intelligence capable of running operations without guidance from home. Above all, they will need a target — a planet so intriguing that people are willing to spend decades and billions of dollars studying it. NASA’s TESS space telescope is doing some of that reconnaissance work right now, scanning for Earth-size worlds around local stars.

“Ultimately, to see the life on an exoplanet, we will have to visit. But a gravity lens mission allows you to study potential targets many decades, if not centuries, earlier,” Turyshev says merrily.

A journey to the SGL would take us beyond Alkalai’s baby steps, well onto the path toward interstellar exploration. It’s another audacious goal, but at least the odds of catching fire are much lower this time around.

Corey S. Powell , a contributing editor of Discover , also writes for the magazine's Out There blog. Follow him on Twitter: @coreyspowell. This story originally appeared in print as "Boldly Go."

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Nasa spacecraft embarks on historic journey into interstellar space.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

“Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind’s historic leap into interstellar space,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we’ve all been asking — ‘Are we there yet?’ Yes, we are.”

Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft’s interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years.

Voyager 1 does not have a working plasma sensor, so scientists needed a different way to measure the spacecraft’s plasma environment to make a definitive determination of its location. A coronal mass ejection, or a massive burst of solar wind and magnetic fields, that erupted from the sun in March 2012 provided scientists the data they needed. When this unexpected gift from the sun eventually arrived at Voyager 1’s location 13 months later, in April 2013, the plasma around the spacecraft began to vibrate like a violin string. On April 9, Voyager 1’s plasma wave instrument detected the movement. The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma. The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space.

The plasma wave science team reviewed its data and found an earlier, fainter set of oscillations in October and November 2012. Through extrapolation of measured plasma densities from both events, the team determined Voyager 1 first entered interstellar space in August 2012.

“We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data — they showed us the spacecraft was in an entirely new region, comparable to what was expected in interstellar space, and totally different than in the solar bubble,” Gurnett said. “Clearly we had passed through the heliopause, which is the long-hypothesized boundary between the solar plasma and the interstellar plasma.”

The new plasma data suggested a timeframe consistent with abrupt, durable changes in the density of energetic particles that were first detected on Aug. 25, 2012. The Voyager team generally accepts this date as the date of interstellar arrival. The charged particle and plasma changes were what would have been expected during a crossing of the heliopause.

“The team’s hard work to build durable spacecraft and carefully manage the Voyager spacecraft’s limited resources paid off in another first for NASA and humanity,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. “We expect the fields and particles science instruments on Voyager will continue to send back data through at least 2020. We can’t wait to see what the Voyager instruments show us next about deep space.”

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched 16 days apart in 1977. Both spacecraft flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 also flew by Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2, launched before Voyager 1, is the longest continuously operated spacecraft. It is about 9.5 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) away from our sun.

Voyager mission controllers still talk to or receive data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 every day, though the emitted signals are currently very dim, at about 23 watts — the power of a refrigerator light bulb. By the time the signals get to Earth, they are a fraction of a billion-billionth of a watt. Data from Voyager 1’s instruments are transmitted to Earth typically at 160 bits per second, and captured by 34- and 70-meter NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) stations. Traveling at the speed of light, a signal from Voyager 1 takes about 17 hours to travel to Earth. After the data are transmitted to JPL and processed by the science teams, Voyager data are made publicly available.

“Voyager has boldly gone where no probe has gone before, marking one of the most significant technological achievements in the annals of the history of science, and adding a new chapter in human scientific dreams and endeavors,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science in Washington. “Perhaps some future deep space explorers will catch up with Voyager, our first interstellar envoy, and reflect on how this intrepid spacecraft helped enable their journey.”

Scientists do not know when Voyager 1 will reach the undisturbed part of interstellar space where there is no influence from our sun. They also are not certain when Voyager 2 is expected to cross into interstellar space, but they believe it is not very far behind.

JPL built and operates the twin Voyager spacecraft. The Voyagers Interstellar Mission is a part of NASA’s Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s DSN, managed by JPL, is an international network of antennas that supports interplanetary spacecraft missions and radio and radar astronomy observations for the exploration of the solar system and the universe. The network also supports selected Earth-orbiting missions.

The cost of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions — including launch, mission operations and the spacecraft’s nuclear batteries, which were provided by the Department of Energy — is about $988 million through September.

For a sound file of the oscillations detected by Voyager in interstellar space, animations and other information, visit:

For an image of the radio signal from Voyager 1 on Feb. 21 by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array, which links telescopes from Hawaii to St. Croix, visit:

Protected: Milky Way’s Black Hole Was “Birth Cry” of Radio Astronomy

Dwayne Brown Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1726 [email protected] Jia-Rui C. Cook Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-354-0850 [email protected]

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Interstellar travel: From science fiction to reality

Humans may one day travel beyond the solar system on board rockets powered by nuclear fusion.

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

Only two probes have reached interstellar space – the region beyond the solar system – since the start of human space exploration .

It took more than three decades for the first spacecraft, Voyager 1 , to cross the heliopause, a boundary scientists believe is where interstellar space begins, after its launch in 1977.

It was an incredible achievement with invaluable data sent back through a medium not influenced by the Sun.

But with its power supply weakening it is almost impossible Voyager 1 will reach our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away and would take the probe almost 73,000 years.

Les Johnson, a Nasa scientist and author of several scientific and science fiction books, told The National reaching another star could take 50 to 100 years.

“It is possible we might have the technology to send our first robotic probe to another star within the next 50 to 100 years,” said Mr Johnson, who managed the Interstellar Propulsion Research Project at the US space agency.

“Based on the rate of technology growth, after looking at all the propulsion systems that are based on known physics, I believe these first probes will be propelled to the stars using laser light reflecting from a sail, similar to today’s solar sails but driven by intense laser light instead of sunlight.”

Human travel to interstellar space

It could take significantly longer for a crewed mission to travel to another star, as laser light sails would only work for smaller spacecraft.

Nuclear fusion propulsion, a way of powering a spacecraft using high-energy particles created by fusion reactions, is needed to make human missions to interstellar space possible.

“As for humans, that’s a lot more complicated because it takes a lot of mass to keep a group of humans alive for a decade- to centuries-long space journey and that means a massive ship,” Mr Johnson said.

“For a human crewed ship, we will need fusion propulsion at a minimum and antimatter as the ideal.

“While we know these are physically possible, the technology level needed for interstellar travel seems very far away – perhaps 100 to 200 years in the future.”

While scientists dream of antimatter propulsion, which could enable space travel at 70 per cent of the speed of light, nuclear fusion propulsion appears much closer to reality.

The technology could also help reduce the time it takes to reach Mars, the planet to which most space agencies are trying to send their astronauts.

Laura Forczyk, an author and the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, said nuclear fusion propulsion has the potential to revolutionise space flight.

"We will not be able to achieve interstellar travel until we engineer a faster and more efficient means of accelerating," said Ms Forczyk.

"We also need to develop long-term, self-sustained robust ecosystems for long-duration voyages and a better means of radiation shielding. We are at least a century away from these advances."

While developing nuclear fusion technology is not easy, with the required temperature to achieve it 10 times hotter than the Sun, a few companies have been trying for many years.

California-based start-up Helicity Space recently received $5 million in seed funding to accelerate its fusion propulsion technology projects.

UK-based start-up Pulsar Fusion is also attempting to develop the technology and has started construction on a large nuclear fusion chamber in England.

When the engine is fired, it would, at least temporarily, be the hottest place in the solar system.

China is also trying to advance the development of nuclear fusion, with reports of a new state-owned company that would help accelerate the production of an "artificial Sun".

Is there an Earth-like planet beyond the solar system?

One of the reasons scientists want to explore interstellar space is to learn more about the universe and possibilities of life beyond Earth.

Nasa has been studying exoplanets, or planets outside of the solar system, for decades by using telescopes.

Mr Johnson said he "doubts we will find Earth 2.0 anywhere close" and that discovering another home-like planet was not thought to be a near-term possibility.

"Over time, we might be able to modify another planet to make it habitable but that will likely take additional centuries or millennia," he said.

"That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go. The job of science is to learn more about the universe in which we live.

"Studying planets around other stars will help us better understand our own solar system and expand our knowledge of this big universe. That alone, in my opinion, makes the journey one we should make."

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From solar sails to hyperspace: Here’s the future of interstellar travel

Will it ever be possible to zip around the cosmos like Baby Yoda and co in The Mandalorian ? A physicist explains.

Stephen Kelly

Hyperspace travel – the ability for spaceships to travel as fast as the speed of light – is an integral part of the Star Wars universe.

The new series of The Mandalorian , for instance, would be quite a different show if Mando and Grogu had to wait 6,000 years to fly from one planet to the next.

But it does raise the question of just how feasible such technology is. Will we ever attain the ability to travel vast distances across space without having to burn through generations of astronauts? Or are we just marooned in our corner of the Galaxy?

To answer that, Prof Patrick Johnson , author of The Physics Of Star Wars , needs to be clear on what, exactly, hyperspace travel is.

“If we’re talking about the idea that spaceships in Star Wars accelerate forward as fast, or faster than, the speed of light, then that is not plausible,” he says.

“The speed of light is the speed limit of the Universe. Once you travel faster than light, cause and effect begin to break down. You could feasibly view an event happening five light-years away, travel faster than the speed of light towards it and get there before it happens. It’s basically time travel.”

A more realistic option, says Johnson, is that instead of ships in Star Wars accelerating at the speed of light, hyperdrive technology enables them to create a wormhole in order to travel from one point in space to another.

“It would be like folding a piece of paper and punching a hole through it so an ant can get to the other side,” he says.

It would also explain why, in certain hyperspace sequences in Star Wars , the ships look like they’re travelling through a blue tunnel. (Although, of course, there are also other scenes, such as Vice-Admiral Holdo flying a ship at light speed through another ship in The Last Jedi , that lend strength to the accelerating theory).

The problem with creating a wormhole, says Johnson, is that no one knows how to do it; it’s more theoretical than practical. “It would perhaps be easier to find a pre-existing wormhole and just hope it leads to somewhere you want to go,” he says.

“As for creating one, that would take decades’ worth of human energy. And that’s before we figure out how to target a particular location.”

Johnson also insists that any wormhole created would have to be far away from Earth.

“Going back to the paper analogy, it’s not going to end well for the ant if it happens to be in the spot where the pencil bursts through. You would need an empty, unoccupied part of space, along with incredibly complex calculations and some sort of up-to-date star map, to ensure that the planet you’re going to is in the right place.”

At this stage, both options seem as unlikely as each other, which means that we are stuck in our Solar System for the foreseeable future.

But Johnson lives in hope that, even if we can’t accelerate at light speed, we can develop ways to travel long distances across the Galaxy.

“Without hyperdrives, I’d say our best bet for getting far, far away in a reasonable amount of time is solar sail technology,” he says. “These would operate like wind sails, but instead use the light from a star to push the ship forward and essentially give it an unlimited supply of fuel. The acceleration would be small at first, but after 10 years you could get up to around 20 per cent of the speed of light, which is very good.”

Promising – but we wouldn’t book that holiday to Tatooine just yet.

About our expert

Patrick Johnson is an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University’s department of physics, and author of The Physics Of Star Wars . Earning his PhD at Washington University in St Louis, Johnson’s work on quantum mechanics has been published in Physical Review journal.

• Tardigrades could be the first interstellar space travellers
• What would faster-than-light (hyperspace) travel look like?

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Interstellar Travel: Magnetic Fusion Plasma Engines Could Carry Us Across the Solar System and Beyond

By Matt Williams, Universe Today October 22, 2023

Florian Neukart, an Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute, has proposed the Magnetic Fusion Plasma Drive (MFPD) as a novel space propulsion method. This concept combines fusion propulsion, ionic propulsion, and more, promising high energy density and fuel efficiency.

Florian Neukart introduces the Magnetic Fusion Plasma Drive, a revolutionary propulsion method combining fusion and ionic techniques. Offering immense energy density and numerous advantages, it could redefine space exploration, although challenges in sustaining fusion reactions in space remain.

Missions to the Moon, missions to Mars , robotic explorers to the outer Solar System, a mission to the nearest star, and maybe even a spacecraft to catch up to interstellar objects passing through our system. If you think this sounds like a description of the coming age of space exploration, then you’d be correct! At this moment, there are multiple plans and proposals for missions that will send astronauts and/or probes to all of these destinations to conduct some of the most lucrative scientific research ever performed. Naturally, these mission profiles raise all kinds of challenges, not the least of which is propulsion.

Simply put, humanity is reaching the limits of what conventional (chemical) propulsion can do. To send missions to Mars and other deep space destinations, advanced propulsion technologies are required that offer high acceleration (delta-v), specific impulse ( I sp ), and fuel efficiency. In a recent paper, Leiden Professor Florian Neukart proposes how future missions could rely on a novel propulsion concept known as the Magnetic Fusion Plasma Drive (MFPD). This device combines aspects of different propulsion methods to create a system that offers high energy density and fuel efficiency significantly greater than conventional methods.

What will it take before human beings can travel to the nearest star system within their own lifetimes? Credit: Shigemi Numazawa/ Project Daedalus

Florian Neukart is an Assistant Professor with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) at Leiden University and a Board Member of the Swiss quantum technology developer Terra Quantum AG . The preprint of his paper recently appeared online and is being reviewed for publication in Elsevier .

Why the Need for Advanced Propulsion?

According to Neukart, technologies that can surmount conventional chemical propulsion (CCP) are paramount in the present era of space exploration. In particular, these technologies must offer greater energy efficiency, thrust, and capability for long-duration missions.

This is especially true for missions to Mars and other locations beyond the Earth-Moon system, which pose serious risks to astronaut health, safety, and well-being. Even when Earth and Mars are at their closest every 26 months (a Mars Opposition ), it can take up to 9 months to make a one-way transit to the planet. Combined with surface operations that could last up to a year and the nine-month return trip, missions to Mars could last up to 900 days! During this time, astronauts will be exposed to elevated levels of cosmic and solar radiation, not to mention the toll of long periods spent in microgravity will have on their bodies.

Hence, NASA and other space agencies are actively investigating alternate means of propulsion. As noted in a previous article, “ How Long Would It Take To Travel To The Nearest Star? ,” these concepts are also considered potential means for achieving interstellar travel for decades. They include fuel-efficient concepts like electric or ion propulsion, which utilize electromagnetic fields to ionize inert propellant (like xenon gas) and accelerate it through nozzles to generate thrust. However, these concepts generally produce low thrust and must rely on heavy power sources (solar arrays or nuclear reactors) to generate more.

Artist’s depiction of the IKAROS spaceprobe ( the first spacecraft to successfully demonstrate solar sail technology in interplanetary space) in flight. Credit: Andrzej Mirecki

Solar Sails are another option, which can generate continuous acceleration while requiring no propellant (thereby saving on mass). However, missions equipped with this technology are limited in terms of thrust and must operate closer to the Sun. A twist on the idea is to employ Gigawatt-energy (GWe) laser arrays to accelerate spacecraft equipped with sails to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). However, this concept requires expensive infrastructure and tremendous amounts of power in order to be feasible.

Nuclear and Fusion Propulsion

Another popular concept is nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), which NASA and DARPA are currently developing in the form of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). This method relies on a nuclear reactor to heat propellant (like liquid hydrogen), causing it to expand through nozzles to generate thrust. The benefits of NTP include very high energy density and significant acceleration, but it also comes with numerous technical and safety challenges involving the handling and launching of nuclear materials.

A spacecraft powered by a positron reactor would resemble this artist’s concept of the Mars Reference Mission spacecraft. Credit: NASA

There are also propulsion concepts that harness fusion reactions, like Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) and Deuterium-Helium three (D-He3) reactions, something that theoretical scientists have been working with for decades. These methods offer the potential for high thrust and extremely high specific impulse but also present technical challenges, not the least of which are related to handling the necessary fuel and achieving sustained and controlled fusion reactions. There are also more exotic concepts, like antimatter propulsion and the Alcubierre Warp Drive, but none of these will be available in the foreseeable future.

Neukart’s Revolutionary Concept

And there’s Neukart’s proposal, which combines elements of fusion propulsion, ionic propulsion, and other concepts. As he explained to Universe Today via email:

“The MFPD is a propulsion system for space exploration, utilizing controlled nuclear fusion reactions as a primary energy source for both thrust and potential electric power generation. The system is predicated on harnessing the immense energy output from fusion reactions, typically involving isotopes of hydrogen or helium, to produce a high-velocity exhaust of particles, thereby generating thrust according to Newton’s third law.

“The plasma from the fusion reactions is confined and manipulated using magnetic fields, ensuring controlled energy release and directionality. Simultaneously, the MFPD concept envisages the possibility of converting part of the fusion energy into electrical power to sustain onboard systems and possibly the reaction control system of the spacecraft.”

Artist’s concept of a Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket in Low Earth Orbit. Credit: NASA

To develop this concept, Nuekart began with deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion reactions since it is one of the most researched and understood reactions and offers a clear and familiar basis for elaborating the core principles and mechanics of MFPD. Furthermore, Neukart added, D-T reactions have relatively low ignition temperatures and a higher cross-section than other concepts, making it a good “starting point.” Therefore, they provide a useful benchmark for measuring and comparing the performance of this theoretical propulsion system.

However, the ultimate goal of MFPD is to harness aneutronic fusion (p-B11), where very little of the energy released by the reactions is carried by neutrons. Aneutronic reactions, in contrast, release energy in the form of charged particles (typically protons or alpha particles), thereby significantly reducing the level of neutron radiation produced.

Advantages of MFPD

The advantages of this system are immediately apparent, combining high specific impulse and immense energy density and providing both thrust and power from a single energy source. Other benefits, said Neukert, include the following:

• High Specific Impulse: The MFPD can provide a high-specific impulse, delivering substantial velocity change (delta-v) to the spacecraft, facilitating missions to distant celestial bodies.
• Energy-Dense Fuel:  Fusion fuel, like isotopes of hydrogen, is incredibly energy-dense, potentially enabling extended missions without needing vast amounts of propellant.
• Lower Mass Fractions: The spacecraft might be designed with lower mass fractions dedicated to fuel storage, affording more mass allocation for scientific instruments or additional technologies.
• Dual Utility:  The MFPD is not just a propulsion system; it is also envisioned to provide electrical power for the spacecraft’s systems and instruments, which is crucial for long-duration missions.
• Adaptability: The potential to adjust the thrust and specific impulse, offering versatility for different mission phases, such as acceleration, cruising, and deceleration.
• Reduced Travel Time:  The potential for higher continuous thrust may significantly reduce transit times to distant destinations, mitigating risks related to cosmic radiation exposure and onboard resource management.
• Radiation Shielding:  Although challenging, the inherent magnetic and physical structures might be engineered to provide some level of radiation shielding for the spacecraft and crew, utilizing the plasma and magnetic fields.
• Independence from Solar Proximity:  Unlike solar sails or solar electric propulsion, the MFPD does not depend on proximity to the Sun; thus, it is viable for missions into the outer solar system and beyond.
• Minimized Risk of Nuclear Contamination:  Compared to nuclear-thermal or fission-electric concepts, the MFPD could be designed to minimize the risk of radioactive contamination, given that fusion, in general, requires less radioactive material and potentially allows for safer reactor shutdown.

Implications and Challenges

As to the implications this system could have for space exploration, Nuekart emphasized the ability to traverse vast cosmic distances in reduced timeframes, expanding mission profiles (fast transits to other planets in the Solar System and interstellar missions), mitigating the risks of long-duration space missions (exposure to radiation and microgravity), revolutionizing spacecraft design by providing propulsion and electrical power simultaneously, and enhancing human exploration capabilities.

Beyond that, he also foresees the potential for technological spin-offs in materials science, plasma physics, and energy production that could have applications here on Earth. The development of this system could also foster international collaborations, bringing experts and resources from multiple fields together to realize common exploratory objectives.

Of course, no next-generation technology proposal would be complete without some caveats and addendums. For instance, said Nuekart, the main challenge for MFPD propulsion lies in achieving and maintaining stable fusion relations in space. On Earth, researchers have made considerable progress with magnetic confinement (MCF) and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The former involves Tokamok reactors using magnetic fields to confine fusion in the form of plasma, while the latter relies on lasers to compress and heat tablets of D-T fuel.

However, similar experiments have not been conducted in space, leading to questions about how the system will handle heat caused by reactions, the resulting radiation, and the structural implications for spacecraft. Nevertheless, the ball is already rolling on nuclear tests in space (the aforementioned DRACO demonstrator). Given the benefits of fusion propulsion, it’s not likely to remain on the drawing board for long. Ultimately, says Nuekart, the research into MFPD aims to establish a pathway that will lead to interplanetary and (someday) Interstellar exploration:

“While the journey to realize the MFPD concept will undeniably be layered with challenges and scientific hurdles, the potential payoff is monumental. Achieving reliable, effective, and efficient fusion propulsion could redefine the boundaries of achievable goals, propelling humanity into a new era of exploration, discovery, and understanding of the cosmos. The hope is that the research seeds curiosity, innovation, and determination among scientists, engineers, and explorers across the globe, charting the course toward our future among the stars.”

Adapted from an article originally published on Universe Today .

Reference: “Magnetic Fusion Plasma Drive” by Florian Neukart, 20 September 2023, Physics > General Physics . arXiv:2309.11524

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15 comments on "interstellar travel: magnetic fusion plasma engines could carry us across the solar system and beyond".

What’s the difference between this and a fusion torch drive, which scientists have been discussing since at least the late 1960s?

An important development to MFPD and other variations would be to accelerate ionized plasma to relativistic speeds. This could be done by designing the craft to essentially being a particle accelerator in space. Generate ionized plasma, accelerate using magnetized array to near light speeds, then controlled release into space for propulsion. Configurations could be large rings (plasma in both clockwise and counter directions to equalize thrust), tighter helical cylinders, or other geometries that allow continuous and repeated acceleration of plasma. This may be why UAP (UFOs) are saucer or cylindrical in shape. Warp speed (Cochran) is another matter, but something that would make a Mars run in a day would be pretty cool and useful.

Polonium photonic 210 584004336573921005

Plenty of cool artistic depictions and nothing more. It’s a relief though ’cause mankind really NEEDS to stay grounded on this space rock. Once our filth and our greed and our utter disregard for the balance of nature gets scattered throughout the galaxy, it’ll be the end of the universe. We can’t restrain ourselves from destroying this planet…, how in the world will we exercise restraint when/ if we do succeed in interstellar travel?

We only have hydrogen and oxygen as a propellant. All other ionic propellants are science fiction at best.

Hydrazine, JP4, JP5, hydrogen peroxide and many others have been in use for years. And all of those are chemical reactions which don’t use much of the available energy. A fusion-based drive would kick things up a major notch.

It’s sad that you use DALLE3(AI) to generate your primary content image. Yes, it’s super obvious. It detracts from the credibility of the article and by extension the entire website.

I tend to agree with Alexander H&O are the most conventional propellants available for normal lenght/time movement. UFOs, if real, don’t use these materials, from what we’ve ever seen. They appear to ‘go’ by using field modification controlled by ? Electro-magnetics? and features of the physical world which we’ve only talked about. Things like ‘worm-holes’ or they artist’s depiction of the saucer sliding between the gravitational field lines. I’m sorry, at my advanced age, I cannot help to observe that time and distance are not absolutes. If I’m talking tensor lengths and time being speed depend, well then we are looking for methods for travel enhancement in the wrong intellectual place.

I understood about half of this article but could you use electromagnets for propulsion?

Adjusting the field strength to go faster.

Why are we still not looking in to creating our own magnet field as a shield for a space craft by spinning magnets with mercury..

I think we already have something like this in a black program. I witnessed a very large craft with 6 large ion or plasma engines fly right over my car one night Nov. 21, 2008, just east of Kingman AZ, on I40 near Exit 66 and the Pedco truck stop. Each engine was massive, about the size and shape of a drive-in movie screen. 3 across and 2 rows. They glowed purple blue and white. The haze stretched out behind it at least 50 yards. It seemed to be in trouble, it had sparks dripping from the front and electrical arcing across the bottom. It was only 200 feet or less above my car, based on the details I could see on the bottom and the size of the sparks. I also thought about the angle I was looking up, was like looking at the buildings in Los Angeles from the 110. So about 20 or 30 floors, 200 or 300 feet. I said to myself and laughed, “I hope its one of ours.” I have been looking for clues to how those engines could be made that big, I did see a NASA spokesman talking about stacking small ion engines together to make larger ones, just like they do to make jumbo TV screens for ballparks. Maybe that’s what I saw. A craft in trouble flying low to avoid radar and coming in for repairs. It was the biggest thing I have ever seen in the sky, and I worked on the C-17 in the 80’s. It was much bigger than that. If anyone else has seen anything like this with the glowing engines, pleasae reply.

I wonder about the possibility of multiple people having this information in their brain and not being important enough to be heard on the subject. I have neither the expertise nor the educational background to know any of this, yet I do. I have never known why… This question has plagued me. My design has never been developed publicly. Yet I have this knowledge and my design… of much of what is spoken of in this article. I have received a world of criticism (especially based upon my lack of knowledge in this/these fields… yet I know). I wonder if it’s time to collate all that is known on this field/area of knowledge, in the hope to reveal an answer to the simplest of quedtions: How?

Most of the comments here are wishful thinking but we need to start research in this direction or we’re never going to leave this solar system. As for U.F.O.s, government secrecy leads unwarranted speculation.

SciThechDaily keeps churning up articles about revolutionary inventions, game-changers and disruptors every day. If they all were true, we’d already be out there in the outer space, fighting Klingons.

Excellent literature above! THANK EVERYONE

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How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years

• Antimatter engines could be humanity's ticket to interstellar travel. 
• When antimatter particles come in contact with regular matter, it produces loads of energy. 
• That energy, if we learn to harness it, could get us to Pluto in just a few weeks.

Interstellar travel is only something humanity has achieved in science fiction — like Star Trek's USS Enterprise, which used antimatter engines to travel across star systems.

But antimatter isn't just a sci-fi trope. Antimatter really exists.

Elon Musk has called antimatter power " the ticket for interstellar journeys, " and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to harness it.

Antimatter is made up of particles almost exactly like regular matter but with opposite electric charge. That means when antimatter contacts regular matter, they both annihilate and can produce enormous amounts of energy.

"Annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy," Weed, cofounder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.

Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It's that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.

Space travel at record speed

The benefit of all that energy is that it can be used to either accelerate or decelerate spacecraft at break-neck speeds.

For example, let's take a trip to our nearest star system, Proxima , about 4.2 light years away.

An antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft at 1g (9.8 meters per second squared) getting us to Proxima in just five years, Weed said in 2016 . That's 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 — one of the fastest spacecraft in history — to travel about half the distance, according to NASA .

Even within our own solar system, an antimatter-powered spacecraft could reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks compared to the 9.5 years it took NASA's New Horizons probe to arrive, Weed said.

Why we don't have antimatter engines

The reason we don't have antimatter engines, despite their tremendous capabilities, comes down to cost, not tech.

Gerald Jackson, an accelerator physicist who worked on antimatter projects at Fermilab, told Forbes in 2016 that with enough funding, we could have an antimatter spacecraft prototype within a decade.

The basic technology is there. Physicists armed with the world's most powerful particle accelerators have made antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms.

The issue is that this type of antimatter is incredibly expensive to make. It's considered the most expensive substance on Earth. Jackson gave us an idea of just how much an antimatter machine would cost to build and maintain.

Jackson is the founder, president, and CEO of Hbar Technologies, which is working on a concept for an antimatter space sail to decelerate spacecraft traveling 1% to 10% the speed of light — a useful design for entering into orbit around a distant star, planet, or moon that you want to study.

Related stories

Jackson said he's designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter per year.

"For a 10-kilogram scientific package traveling at 2% of the speed of light, 35 grams of antimatter is needed to decelerate the spacecraft down and inject it into orbit around Proxima Centauri," Jackson told BI.

He said it would take $8 billion to build a solar power plant for the enormous energy needs of antimatter production and cost $670 million per year to operate.

The idea is just that, for now. "There is currently no serious funding for advanced space propulsion concepts," Jackson said.

However, there are other ways to produce antimatter. That's where Weed focused his work.

Weed's concept involves positrons, the antimatter version of an electron.

A different kind of antimatter engine

Positrons "are several thousand times lighter than antiprotons and don't pack quite as much punch when annihilating," Weed said.

The advantage, however, is that they occur naturally and don't need a giant accelerator and billions of dollars to make.

Weed's antimatter propulsion system is designed to use krypton-79 — a form of the element krypton that naturally emits positrons .

The engine system would first gather high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them toward a layer of regular matter, producing annihilation energy. That energy would then trigger a powerful fusion reaction to generate thrust for the spacecraft.

While positrons may be less expensive to obtain than more powerful forms of antimatter, they are difficult to harness because they are highly energetic and need to be slowed down, or "moderated." So building a prototype to test in space is still beyond reach, cost-wise, Weed said.

Such is the case for all antimatter propulsion designs . Over the decades, scientists have proposed dozens of concepts, none of which have come to fruition.

For example, in 1953, Austrian physicist Eugen Sänger proposed a "photon rocket" that would run on positron annihilation energy. And since the '80s, there's been talk of thermal antimatter engines, which would use antimatter to heat liquid, gas, or plasma to provide thrust.

"It's not sci-fi, but we aren't going to see it flying until there is a significant 'mission-pull,'" Weed said about his engine concept.

Can it work?

To build Weed's concept at the scale of a starship, "the devil's in the engineering details," Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist and host of "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, told BI.

"We're talking about a device that harnesses truly enormous amounts of energy, requiring exquisite balance and control," Sutter said.

In general, that enormous energy is another obstacle holding us back from revolutionizing space travel. Because during testing, "if something goes wrong, these are big explosions," Steve Howe, a physicist who worked on antimatter concepts with NASA in the '90s, told BI.

"So we need an ability to test high energy density systems somewhere that don't threaten the biosphere, but still allow us to develop them," said Howe, who thinks the moon would make a good testing base. "And if something goes wrong, you melted a piece of the moon," and not Earth, he added.

Antimatter tends to bring out the imagination in everyone who works on them. "But, we need crazy but plausible ideas to make it further into space, so it's worth looking into," Sutter said.

Weed echoes the sentiment, saying "until there is a compelling reason to get to the Kuiper Belt , the Solar Gravitational Lens, or Alpha Centauri really quickly — or perhaps we are trying to return large asteroids for mining — progress will continue to be slow in this area."

Watch: NASA wants to land a nuclear-powered spacecraft on Pluto

• Main content

Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos

To the stars.

Astronomers recently announced strong evidence of an Earth-like alien planet around Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun, making it the closest exoplanet found to date . Though the star system is our cosmic neighbor, it is still located 4.2 light-years, or 25 trillion miles, away from Earth. At such distances, could we ever visit the newfound planet?

Even the nearest stars would takes tens of thousands of years to reach using conventional spacecraft, such as the robotic probes being used now to explore the solar system . These spacecraft are driven by a combination of chemical rockets, low-thrust ion drives and gravity-assisted trajectories — including so-called "slingshot maneuvers" around the sun or large planets that give them a big burst of speed.

But if we're going to travel beyond our solar system, we're going to need something a little faster than that — perhaps something like the giant Project Daedalus fusion rocket, shown here to scale with NASA’s Saturn V rocket in an illustration by graphical engineer and space artist Adrian Mann , whose work is featured in this countdown of futuristic space technologies. Here are seven ways that robots, or even human explorers, could visit the Proxima Centauri system or other cosmic neighborhoods.

Project Daedalus

Project Daedalus is a concept design for an interstellar probe, developed in the 1970s by a group of technical specialists for the British Interplanetary Society. The target destination was Barnard’s Star — a red dwarf about 6 light-years away, in many ways similar to Proxima Centauri, where astronomers now report they have found signs of a potentially habitable planet . When Project Daedalus was conceived, some astronomers thought a gas giant planet might be in orbit around Barnard's Star, but since then, no planets have been found in the star system.

The result of the five-year project was the design of the Daedalus spacecraft, a two-stage, 54,000-ton nuclear rocket that would boost a 400-ton robotic probe to around 12 percent of the speed of light. This would enable the probe to make the 6-light-year journey to Barnard’s Star in around 50 years.

The rockets of the Daedalus spacecraft would be powered by nuclear fusion, using electron beams to detonate a stream of pellets of fuel such as helium-3, which could be mined from the surface of the moon. Even so, the engines would consume tens of thousands of tons of fuel to get the spacecraft up to its top speed in about 4 years — and because there wouldn’t be any fuel left to slow down, the end result of the 50-year journey would be just a 70-hour flyby of the destination system, before the spacecraft speeds past into interstellar space.

The Daedalus would be much too large to lift off from the Earth’s surface, so it would have to be built in orbit, which means spacecraft like this couldn’t be built without a capacity for construction in space that doesn’t exist today, said space scientist Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck College in the United Kingdom.

While Crawford thinks the science behind the Project Daedalus concept is better understood now than when the spacecraft was designed, he said the immense cost and enormous technical challenges likely mean it would be more than 100 years before something like the Daedalus sets out for the stars.

Project Icarus

The Project Daedalus concepts from the 1970s are the inspiration for Project Icarus, an ongoing joint project by the British Interplanetary Society and the Icarus Interstellar organization, an international network of scientists, engineers and enthusiasts who hope to develop the capabilities for interstellar spaceflight by the year 2100.

Project Icarus is designed to reach any star within 22 light-years of Earth that has a potentially habitable exoplanet, meaning if a planet is confirmed around Proxima Centauri, it could become a target destination.

Project Icarus aims to update the Daedalus design with new technologies and ideas. Among the refinements proposed are fusion rocket engines that use a different nuclear fuel, which would be detonated by lasers instead of electron beams — a technology that could draw from recent advances in laser-ignition fusion at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Crawford said.

The Icarus probe could also be smaller than the 400-ton probe envisioned for Project Daedalus,  thanks to advances in electronic miniaturization and robotics, and future nanotechnologies — which would mean the spacecraft would need to carry less fuel to reach its full speed.

Our best bet for interstellar travel may be to not use a rocket at all, Crawford said. Light sails , which use the pressure of light to propel a payload, are already being considered for interplanetary space probes, and in 2010 Japan’s experimental IKAROS spacecraft successfully used its 60-foot-wide (20 meters) light sail to maneuver during a six-month journey to Venus.

But although light sails driven by sunlight are already an effective way to explore the solar system, they are not fast enough to cover interstellar distances in a reasonable amount of time.

Crawford said the answer may be to use powerful lasers to push the light sail to very high speeds with bursts of light at the start of the journey, until the spacecraft is too far from the laser source to gain more thrust from the light beam.

Since the driving lasers would be built on Earth or in orbit, interstellar light-sail spacecraft would not need to carry fuel for the journey, and so the mass of the spacecraft could be kept small.

Laser-driven light sail spacecraft are the basis of the Breakthrough Starshot project that was announced this year by investor Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking. The project aims to build a working prototype by 2036 at a final mission cost of around $10 billion dollars.

The project envisages a swarm of around 1,000 stamp-size "StarChip" spacecraft, each weighing a few grams and attached to a light sail measuring 13 feet (4 m) across, which would be deployed from a "mothership" in orbit before being accelerated by ground-based lasers to speeds of around 15 to 20 percent the speed of light.

This would allow the spacecraft to make the 4-light-year journey to the Alpha Centauri system — a triple-star system that includes the star Proxima Centauri and its possible planet — in between 20 and 30 years.

The concepts behind the Breakthrough Starshot project have been studied by Philip Lubin, a professor of cosmology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who says the biggest challenge remaining is to create sufficiently powerful lasers to drive the light sail spacecraft.

Bussard ramjet

The Bussard Ramjet concept, proposed by physicist Robert Bussard in 1960, combines the high thrust of fusion rockets with the low fuel requirements of light sails.

Instead of carrying its own fuel, a Bussard Ramjet would scoop up the very thin traces of gas and dust found in interstellar space, known as the Interstellar Medium, using a vast funnel-shaped electromagnetic field that extends for thousands of miles in front of the spacecraft.

Hydrogen from the Interstellar Medium would then be compressed and used as fuel in a fusion rocket at the rear of the spacecraft that drives it forward.

In theory, a spacecraft driven by a Bussard Ramjet could continue to accelerate as long as there is enough interstellar gas in its path to provide enough thrust, and could reach a high fraction of the speed of light.

As a result, the venerable Bussard has seen long and honorable service in many works of science fiction, notably Larry Niven’s "Known Space" series of novels and short stories, including the "Ringworld" books; and the 1970 Poul Anderson novel "Tau-Zero" (Doubleday, 1970), in which an interstellar crew push their stricken Bussard spacecraft to relativistic speeds to avoid destruction.

Unfortunately, the Interstellar Medium around our solar system and the nearby stars is especially thin, and scientist have calculated that there’s just not enough hydrogen there to fuel a Bussard Ramjet. "It's not the ideal part of the galaxy," Crawford said.

But he explained that several ideas have been proposed to get around this limitation, including a concept known as a “Ram Augmented Stellar Rocket”, which uses collected matter as reaction mass to drive the spacecraft forward, using energy beamed to it by a laser; and an "Interstellar Runway," which would use deposits of fuel positioned in advance in the path of an accelerating Bussard spacecraft.

Antimatter rocket & black hole drive

Beyond light sails, giant lasers and fusion rockets, a few even more exotic options for interstellar travel have been proposed, such as rockets powered by the extremely violent (and supremely efficient) annihilation reaction of matter and antimatter.

"Antimatter would be an excellent rocket fuel, because its energy density is so high," Crawford said. "But, of course it doesn't exist in nature, we have to make it. And it's very difficult and expensive to make, and very dangerous once you've made it — so who knows whether it could ever be used as a rocket fuel?"

Another proposal for using exotic physics to drive a spacecraft is the "Schwarzschild Kugelblitz" drive, which would use a microscopic, artificial black hole contained within its engines as its power source.

One idea for a ship equipped with the so-called "SK Drive," shown above, would trap Hawking radiation from the rapid and extremely violent decay of the tiny black hole, and convert it to energy that can be used it to propel the spacecraft.

Each of the artificial black holes would only survive for a few years, so new black holes would need to be created on demand, possibly by compressing pellets of matter with gamma-ray lasers.

According to a 2009 research paper , an SK-drive starship powered by a microscopic black hole with the mass of a modern supertanker could accelerate to 10 percent of the speed of light within 20 days. The black hole would last around 3.5 years before it decayed entirely, and would output more than 160 petawatts, or 160 quadrillion watts, of power in its lifetime.

Human "Slow Boats"

Even with super-fast rockets traveling at speeds of 10 percent or more of the speed of light, it would take many human lifetimes to reach all but the very nearest stars. And although Crawford is an advocate of human exploration of the solar system, he said that interstellar distances are too vast to make a human voyage conceivable within the next few hundred years.

"I think humans can explore the planets more effectively than robots, and I also think there are cultural reasons for sending humans into space, to broaden our range of experiences and enrich human culture," he said. "Now, it’s true that all of that would apply on the interstellar scale as well — it’s just that the distances are so large and the technical difficulties so great that advocating it at this stage is almost inconceivable."

Even so, several ideas exist for what are known as "Slow Boat" concepts that might one day take humans to the stars, including:

Sleeper Ships , in which human crewmembers are kept in a state of "deep sleep" or "suspended animation" for the duration of the very long voyage. This idea has featured in several science fiction movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey" made in 1969, Ridley Scott's "Alien" in 1979 and James Cameron's "Avatar" in 2009.

World Ships , also known as generation ships or interstellar arks, would be giant self-contained space habitats carrying large populations of humans and other species from Earth on a relatively leisurely journey to colonize exoplanets — journeys that would take many centuries to complete. Entire generations would live and die during the voyage, and only the descendants of the original population would arrive at the destination.

Embryo Ships would send cryogenically frozen embryonic humans, instead of sleeping or living humans, to a distant colony planet, where they would be "hatched out" and educated on their mission by a crew of protective robots.

Faster than light?

Wherever astronomers look in the universe, the Theory of Relativity holds fast. As Albert Einstein showed, it's not possible to accelerate a mass to the speed of light in space, nor past it.

But Einstein's equations may yet hold a few tricks that could someday let science do an end-run around the known laws of physics and achieve faster-than-light (FTL) travel — a Holy Grail for generations of science fiction fans.

The best known scientific concept for FTL travel is the Alcubierre drive, proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

The proposed drive operates by using intense gravitational forces, generated by two rotating rings of dense exotic matter, to shrink the physical dimensions of space in front of the spacecraft while expanding the space behind it, at a rate that could appear to exceed the speed of light.

In Alcubierre's proposal, which requires a type of exotic matter for the rings that is not known to exist, the spacecraft inside the "warp bubble" created by the drive would never travel faster than light in its local space, and so would not violate the laws of relativity.

Other speculative ideas for FTL travel include using trans-dimensional wormholes — also theoretically possible, but not known to exist — to travel between entangled but distant regions of space; or to daringly skim the edges of a large, spinning black hole, as depicted in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 movie "Interstellar."

But Crawford notes that the concept of faster-than-light travel is rife with unknowns and apparent contradictions, such as violating the principle of causality, in which events are caused by other events that happened earlier in time, and not the other way around. So, it's likely the proposals would prove impossible, even if they were technologically feasible to attempt.

"I don't want to sound overly pessimistic, because I can see huge benefits of being able to travel to the stars, but the laws of physics are the laws of physics, and it is going to be really difficult," Crawford said.

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Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.

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Universe Today

Space and astronomy news

Is Humanity Ready to Realize the Dream of Interstellar Travel?

For generations, humans have dreamed, speculated, and theorized about the possibility of journeying to distant stars, finding habitable planets around them, and settling down. In time, the children of these bold adventurers would create a new civilization and perhaps even meet the children of Earth. People could eventually journey from one world to another, cultures would mix, and trade and exchanges would become a regular feature. The potential for growth that would come from these exchanges – intellectually, socially, politically, technologically, and economically – would be immeasurable.

Expanding humanity’s reach beyond the Solar System is not just the fevered dream of science fiction writers and futurists. It has also been the subject of very serious scientific research, and interest in the subject is again on the rise. Much like sending crewed missions to Mars, establishing permanent outposts on the Moon, and exploring beyond cislunar space with human astronauts instead of robots – there is a growing sense that interstellar travel could be within reach. But just how ready are we for this bold and adventurous prospect? Whether we are talking about probes vs. crews or technological vs. psychological readiness, is interstellar travel something we are ready to take on?

This was a central question raised at a public outreach event aptly named “ Interstellar Travel: Are We Ready? ” that took place at the 8th Interstellar Symposium: In Light of Other Suns , held from July 10th to 13th at the University of McGill in Montreal, Quebec. The symposium was hosted by the Interstellar Research Group (IRG), the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), and Breakthrough Initiatives – in coordination with the University of McGill – and featured guest speakers and luminaries from multiple disciplines – ranging from astronomy and astrophysics to astrobiology, geology, and cosmology.

This public outreach event, organized by Prof. Andrew Higgins (Mechanical Engineering) and the McGill Interstellar Flight Experimental Research Group , occurred on July 10th from 7:30-9:30 PM EST. The event was open to the public and made available for free via a live stream. It was chaired by famed author and NASA scientist and technologist Les Johnson and featured a panel of noted scientists, educators, and space exploration advocates who offered an array of perspectives on this very question. The panel included:

• Alan Stern , at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission
• AJ Link , an adjunct professor at the Howard University School of Law , a disability policy analyst, space law policy expert, and member of Astro Access (promoting accessibility in space)
• Prof. Philip Lubin , the head of the UCSB Experimental Cosmology Group and expert in directed energy for the propulsion (DEP) and planetary defense applications
• Erika Nesvold , Ph.D. physicist, computational astrophysicist, former NASA researcher, and developer at Giant Army (creators of the Universe Sandbox )
• Trevor Kjorlien , a space educator at Plateau Astro and a media production specialist with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)

After each panelist provided a brief introduction of themselves and their perspectives, a general discussion on the issues of interstellar travel was raised, followed by a Q&A session towards the end. Throughout, the panel addressed the chief challenges in realizing interstellar travel, be they technological, psychological, ethical, social, economic, and the like. They also addressed the likely implications, possible solutions, potential timelines, and whether or not humanity is ready to shoulder the associated burdens. As Les Johnson told Universe Today via Zoom:

“I introduced all the panelists, AJ, Allen, Phillip, and Erica. And then Trevor was like the emcee. He’s apparently a popular host in Canada. And does this kind of thing all the time. He’s witty, he’s personable, and so he interacted with the audience, had a list of questions, and we, on the panel, kind of batted around the answers. Some were specific to us, and some were general. And it all centered around this notion of, ‘How do we plan for something that’s far out?’ ‘Why are we doing it?’ Can we really afford to do it, and what’s the scale that it will be?” And there were differences of opinions.”

Going Interstellar

As we explored in a previous article , it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years to reach the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) using conventional propulsion methods. It’s easy to see why space and advanced research agencies have been exploring concepts that could allow for much faster transits since the dawn of the Space Age. Nuclear-Pulse Propulsion (NPP) was an early idea, where fission reactions (nuclear warheads) or the fusing of deuterium or hydrogen fuel would be used to accelerate a spacecraft to a fraction of the speed of light (aka. “relativistic speeds”).

Many historic studies have been conducted, including Project Orion (1958-1963), Project Daedalus (1973-78), the Enzmann Starship (1973), Project Longshot (1987-88), Project Hyperion (2011), and Project Icarus (2009–14). Anti-matter propulsion is another concept that has been explored, which resulted in proposals like Project Valkyrie (2009). There have even been attempts to research Faster-Than-Light (FTL) propulsion, the most notable of which is arguably the Alcubierre Warp Drive , originally proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.

Since 2000, proposals and design studies for ra DEP spacecraft have included Sun-Diver , Project Dragonfly , and (most notably) Breakthrough Starshot . This latter effort, announced in 2016, envisions a fleet of lightsails and nanocraft (the StarChip) accelerated by a 100 Gw laser array to 20% the speed of light. If realized, these spacecraft could accomplish a one-way journey to Alpha Centauri within 20 years (“in our lifetime”) and acquire pictures and data on any exoplanets that happen to be there. These evolving studies show how far the field has come, which Les Johnson noted in his introduction:

“When I first got involved in thinking about interstellar flight, I had been at NASA for about 10 years and was introduced to this community. And the annual gathering of this community was in this little town in Italy, and they met under the guise of being a project or a gathering of scientists talking about ultra-deep space missions. And the reason they did that was because they couldn’t say the word interstellar. Because people didn’t take it seriously…

“There are all sorts of challenges. If we’re ever going to send robots and people, we have to have power [and] communications. If you talk about seeing people, you have to keep us alive, or our progeny. It might be generations of ships. So the challenges are immense, and people didnt’ take it seriously. But there’s been a rapid progress in a lot of the technologies. And I firmly believe we will be launching our Ifirst robotic probes that travel faster than Voyager within the lifetimes of some of the people who are alive today that might get trip time to some of the nearest stars in 100 years.”

In addition to technological developments, the idea of interstellar travel has also received a boost, thanks to developments in other space sectors. These include renewed lunar exploration in this decade – the Artemis Program , the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) – and proposed missions to Mars, which include NASA and China’s plans and commercial proposals by SpaceX. Of course, in addition to the challenges, many ethical, legal, and philosophical implications need to be addressed in advance. To this end, the eclectic panel of experts from various fields offered a good rundown and examinations of the particulars. As Erika Nesvold told Universe Today via email:

“I think each of the panelists talked about the big challenges that we each foresee in the future as humans attempt to send technology to other stellar systems and to live long-term in space. Some of us (like Phil) thought that the energy or cost requirements would be insurmountable. Some of us (like me and AJ) wanted to draw attention to the ethical problems we have yet to solve with astronaut selection, spacecraft design, inclusion, safety, etc. I think all of us are excited about humanity’s future in space, though, and want to see people working on these problems.”

So… Are We?

First, there’s the elephant in the room, which means acknowledging the answer to the big question, “Are we ready?” According to the panelist, the answer is no. Interestingly, this was the one matter that all sides agreed on. Whereas they stated with a fair degree of confidence that robotic missions – a la Breakthrough Starshot – could be realized in the not-too-distant future, the possibility of crewed missions to nearby stars remains a far-off prospect. Said Johnson:

“No, we’re not ready. And it’s technology that’s the prohibitor. But we did conclude that being ready, at least for small robotic missions, is within reach. With the work that Breakthrough Starshot is doing and the spin-offs that might come from that, we all kind of envisioned that it might be possible to send a robotic probe within the next 100 years, give or take. So we’re not as far away from being able to do that as I thought we were when I began my career and looked at interstellar stuff like 20 years ago. I was thinking it was two to three hundred years. We might actually be within one-hundred years from our first robotic probe, which is amazing.”

According to Johnson’s estimates, robotic missions to the nearest star systems could be possible within 100 to 200 years. In the meantime, there are other things we need to be focusing on, things that are more achievable and within our intellectual and creative capacity. In addition, Link raised the question of motivations and values as a barrier, which require serious consideration before attempts at interstellar travel can occur. As Link told Universe Today via email, the transition between interplanetary and interstellar missions (often raised in this context) will not necessarily be a smooth one:

“I think interplanetary journeys are going to be a lot different than interstellar journeys. Mostly because it’s conceivable that most interplanetary journeys within our Solar System will happen within a person’s lifetime – it takes multiple generations to get to a different star. And so I think the values for an interstellar mission are going to be – or should be, at least – very different than an interplanetary mission. In terms of crew selection, monetary systems, if there is a monetary system, that determines resource sharing. I think all those things are going to have to be vastly different for an interstellar mission.”

Cost Assessment

Another major point was the energy requirement, which comes up in any discussion about interstellar travel sooner or later. Like it or not, an interstellar mission only makes sense (from an economic perspective) if it can be done in a person’s lifetime. That, unfortunately, is where the technological prohibition Johnson addressed comes up. As part of the panel discussions, Lubin raised a cost analysis he had previously conducted that concluded that the energy requirements are not currently within our grasp.

According to Lubin, directed-energy propulsion has tremendous potential for interplanetary (Mars in 30 days) and interstellar travel since it is the only technology that can achieve relativistic flight (a fraction of the speed of light) in the foreseeable future. Alas, the applications we can realize now are limited to beaming power from space (or between the Earth and the Moon) and optical communications. On this point, Johnson raised some objections.

“I personally think it’s an irrelevant number because by the time we do this, what is the energy price going to be?” he said. “And what is money going to be? So there are some definite differences.” In the meantime, as Stern eloquently summarized, the technology offers a roadmap that could lead to interstellar exploration someday:

“We’re an aspirational species. An aspiration of many human beings is to see our species explore very far away from our cradle, the Earth. But also, I think the other side of that coin is that you have to start somewhere. If you don’t have the aspiration, and you don’t start to make a plan and say, ‘Well, how do I go about that, what do I have to invent,’ you’ll never get it underway.

“I really believe that the 2020s – and the 20-teens, to some extent – really are the inflection point where Star Trek begins. We are living in an era that people will look back [on] in the 24th and 25th century and say, ‘That’s where spaceflight took off.’ And by having goals that are not just what we can do in this decade, or the next decade, or even in this century, we can actually start to chart a path to the stars.”

Who Gets to Go?

Another important issue when talking about the future of space exploration is access. As Link emphasized, there are so many different people participating in space and who want to participate in space, and they all have different dreams and goals. And, he said, it’s really important to understand this when planning and building projects that will attempt to reach other worlds:

“When you think about accessibility, the example that’s really tangible for folks: it’s a lot easier to build something that’s accessible than to retrofit it. It’s also a lot cheaper to do it from the beginning and design it as accessible from the beginning than having to go in and redo it. And so when we talk about the conversations, I think of the same thing. “In space, it is complicated, disabling; we’re going to get things wrong because you can’t know the answers, and horrible things are going to happen. But the idea [is] that we are preparing for as many situations as possible and in as many ways as possible. Because we have the time, we can really be thoughtful about how we’re creating the new future that we want. That’s why I think that it’s important to start the conversations early.”

Several other ethical implications were raised, which Nesvold addressed in her recent book, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space . During the outreach event, she raised an issue that frequently comes up in the context of space ethics: “Should we settle space?” As she related, there are many people she’s encountered who make persuasive arguments that either humanity should not create permanent human settlements ever or that we should wait until we’ve matured as a species. While Nesvold doesn’t share these particular views, she did acknowledge the importance of open discussion to address the many fears and concerns. As she explained via email:

“I’m an astrophysicist (so I have a technical background like Alan, Phil, and Les), but for the past few years, I’ve been researching and writing about ethics in the context of space settlement. So the perspective I brought to the panel was that of a “space person” encouraging other “space people” to think beyond the technical and financial challenges of space settlement and consider the ethical and social problems that we’ll also need to solve.”

Link’s background also allowed him to relate specific ethical and moral concerns that are also undeniable. When discussing the future of humanity in space and the “Great Migration,” historical parallels are often raised, both positive and negative. The very fact that some perceive past events like “westward expansion” and the colonizing of the Americas, forgetting the genocide, conquest, and slavery that was involved, raises the question of whether we are mature enough as a species to conduct similar experiments in space.

“I am not sure that humanity is ready for regular interplanetary travel and I don’t believe humanity is ready for interstellar travel. Technologically there are still a lot of questions about the safest, best, and most efficient ways to travel. And socially, culturally, spiritually, politically, and economically there are lots of unanswered and unresolved questions – in addition to there being several unaddressed historical problems that will linger with us if we do not confront some of the darker parts of collective histories. Humanity has a lot to work on before we are ready to travel amongst the stars.”

In summary, is humanity ready for interstellar travel? The answer is a hard no. Technologically, ethically, morally, psychologically, and spiritually, we are not prepared to take such a tremendous leap. But the fact that we are having the discussion demonstrates that we are determined to get there. A lot needs to be worked out in the meantime, and interplanetary exploration and settlement are an issue that must be dealt with first. The challenges of becoming “interplanetary” (and whether or not we should even try) will certainly test our mettle and the social fabric of our civilization.

In that respect, the coming decades and centuries will serve as a transitional time for our species. Long before crews ever travel beyond the Heliopause, robotic missions will be sent to explore nearby stars and their planets. As we draw nearer to the day when sending humans to other stars becomes practical, we will be better positioned to address the various questions and challenges. But we must start the discussion today, when the groundwork is being laid that could lead to an interplanetary and interstellar future.

The public outreach event was also an opportunity for Johnson to promote The Ross 248 Project , an anthology of original science fiction stories and scientific essays that explores how humans may one day settle on planets that orbit a red dwarf sun. The volume was edited by Les Johnson and engineer Ken Roy (inventor of the “ Shell World ” concept), who also contributed original stories. I had the honor of contributing to this volume as well in the form of a scientific essay that explores terraforming planets in red dwarf systems.

This latest anthology is the successor to Going Interstellar: Build Starships Now! , edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt. Both volumes are published by Baen Books .

Further Reading: Interstellar Research Group

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One Reply to “Is Humanity Ready to Realize the Dream of Interstellar Travel?”

1. Matt Williams is awesome. All of his articles are awesome.

2. With that being said, there is growing evidence that we already have a Black Budget space program well in excess to what we see publicly. As Ben Rich, the head of Lockheed’s Skunkworks division said back in 1989, “We already have the technology to travel to the stars, but it’s buried so deep in Black Budget projects that it would take an act of God to ever reach the public. Anything you can think of, we already know how to do.”

The mistake is assuming space travel is still a public venture, like in the glory days of NASA. In reality, all of the best minds are hired into classified government and military sectors.

What we see here is a controlled stall for the public.

Comments are closed.

See New Images of the Horsehead Nebula, Captured in Striking Detail by the James Webb Telescope

The beautiful infrared imagery features one of the best known locations in space to study the evolution of stars and interstellar matter

Christian Thorsberg

Daily Correspondent

Named for its stallion-like silhouette, the iconic Horsehead Nebula lies roughly 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion. Its billowing mane of gaseous plumes is illuminated by some of the celestial hunter’s brightest stars.

This week, new infrared images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show this celestial body in never-before-seen detail—the edge of its mane unveiled in high resolution.

Prior to these new portraits, the nebula has been photographed by other space telescopes—first by Hubble in 2013, then by the European Space Agency’s  Euclid last year —but no earlier image revealed as many crisp features as Webb’s. Zooming in on a small portion of the horse’s “mane” allowed researchers to learn more about the nebula’s composition, as well as the stars and galaxies located beyond it.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is made of dense, cold clumps of collapsing interstellar material that are very slowly dissipating. Lighter gas around the horse has already eroded, making the animal-like structure visible. But in another five million years, the entire “head” will disintegrate for good.

The nebula offers an exciting target for future research. “It is considered one of the best regions in the sky to study how radiation interacts with interstellar matter,” according to a statement from NASA.

Of particular interest to astronomers, the Horsehead Nebula is a photon-dominated region (PDR), or a place where ultraviolet light from nearby, massive, young stars creates a heated area of dust and gas. This region lies between the cold gas of the nebula and the charged gas that surrounds the stars.

The chemistry of such an area is fascinating to scientists, because its gases are dense enough to resist becoming charged, but they’re not so dense as to block ultraviolet light. And the Horsehead Nebula—situated relatively near to Earth and oriented edge-on toward our planet—is one of the most ideal sites to study this unique middle ground.

Examining light in PDRs helps astronomers better understand the evolution of matter that lies between stars and gain insights on star formation.

“PDRs represent the interface between sites of active star formation and the more dense molecular material that stars end up forming out of,” writes an international team of researchers in a preliminary analysis of the new Webb data, accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics . As a result, these regions can teach astronomers about the environmental conditions that lead to the creation of stars.

With the new, detailed images, astronomers have gotten a clearer picture of how ultraviolet radiation strips dust particles away from the cloud, where they become carried away on heated gas. The team also shared new findings on how light is blocked and bent by dust, and they are coming to better understand the nebula’s shape in three dimensions.

In future research, astronomers could conduct a more thorough analysis of the Horsehead Nebula’s spectrum, which is likely to help unravel even more mysteries of the structure’s evolution on a tiny, molecular scale.

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Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue , Sierra  magazine, Discover  magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal .

Here Is the Future of Interstellar Spacecraft

Since project daedalus in 1973, humans have been designing craft to fly between the stars..

An Early and Very Ambitious Start

In 1973, the British Interplanetary Society — now, the oldest space advocacy organisation in the world — launched a five year study to design an unmanned spacecraft that was capable of interstellar flight. Project Daedalus  was the first to tackle the question of the possibility of interstellar travel. The goal of the project was discover the feasibility of getting a person to travel to a variety of different target stars using technology of the near future, and getting them there within their lifespan.

Thermonuclear Propulsion

The difficulties of reaching speeds fast enough, generating enough power, and not burning the spacecraft to a crisp were not easily overcome. The Project Daedalus team ended up choosing a nuclear pulse rocket  that could overcome these limitations. Small thermonuclear bombs would be detonated inside cusp-shaped magnetic fields behind the spacecraft, propelling it forward at the highest possible efficiency.

A velocity of more than 10,000 kilometers per second would have to be achieved to complete the mission requirements. But that was only a small part of the challenge. Who would steer it? A sophisticated autopilot system would have to take the reigns, carrying passengers across the galaxies.

The fuel to power the reactors would have to come from a helium-3 isotope, mined from the atmosphere of Jupiter or the Moon by a large hot air balloon; yet another complication to add to an ever-growing list. In the end, a final report published in 1978 declared that interstellar flight was indeed feasible, but a working prototype has yet to be designed.

But to call Project Daedalus a pipe dream would be doing it a disservice. There are numerous indications that space agencies and universities of today have been considering the Project Daedalus ideas , such as using nuclear power as propulsion. The now over thirty-year-old project has laid much of the groundwork of interstellar travel and was the first of its kind.

Project Icarus

Members of the British Interplanetary Society teamed up with the Tau Zero Foundation in 2009 to design a credible interstellar space probe, using the same nuclear fusion-based propulsion system as the one designed for the Daedalus Project.

The project's goals are to complete a set of technical reports that lay out all the details of an interstellar probe, while motivating the next generation of scientists, who will be completing the designs of this spacecraft. The engineering project is currently looking for volunteers to bring it to completion.

The Planetary Society launched a project called LightSail to examine the possibility of a spacecraft that was purely solar-powered and propelled by sunlight alone. A first iteration (LightSail 1) completed a " shakedown cruise " in orbit and transmitted its first signals back to Earth. Its successor, LightSail 2, is set to launch aboard a SpaceX Heavy Falcon rocket in 2018.

The concept of a solar sail used for propulsion in space is not a new one. Alongside the discovery of the photon, astronomers such as Johannes Kepler in the 1600s were already hypothesizing  about the possibility of harvesting the energy of the sun and transferring that momentum to another object as the source of propulsion.

Stephen Hawking has voiced his own desire to launch a light sail called Breakthrough Starshot . At a recent event in Norway, Hawking described the small space probe that could travel "on a beam of light," reaching roughly 160 million k/h (100 million mph). The project has yet to overcome significant hurdles and many rounds of funding.

Bussard Ramjet

In 1960, an American physicist conceptualized an interstellar spacecraft that was able to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Rather than being "weighed down" by the mass of the payload, Bussard's ramjet relied on harvesting hydrogen  and using it as a propellant. Like the original Daedalus Project, the ramjet would use hydrogen in a nuclear fusion reactor to supply the energy needed to carry it to distant stars.

According to his calculations, the ramjet would need a collection area of nearly 10,000 square kilometers . The resulting mass would be astronomical, making it more or less infeasible.

Antimatter Rockets

Long gone are the dreams of fueling an interstellar probe with hydrogen isotopes in a nuclear reaction. The new frontiers of interstellar travel have moved their focus to antimatter thrusters, but reactions between antimatter and matter have very violent consequences . Assuming the possibility of directing the huge amounts of energy created in a single direction, the energy outburst caused by the atoms' mutual annihilation could be collected and used as a rocket propellant — but we are far from being able to test this in reality.

An antimatter rocket has inherent limitations: (1) an immense load of dangerous gamma radiation that results from an antimatter reaction; (2) creating enough antimatter for fuel; and (3) limiting the size of the payload.

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has been funding research into a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship  that overcomes the first challenge. By relying on newly discovered positrons (rather than antiprotons), the resulting gamma rays would be far lower in energy.

More recent designs have overcome the second challenge by designing a kind of antimatter sail . Gerald Jackson, former Fermilab physicist, created  a Kickstarter  to test an antimatter thruster and make antimatter-based propulsion a reality. Another estimated $100 million will have to be raised to develop an Earth-based test.

The IXS Enterprise

NASA designed its own Star Trek -like space warping ship in 2016 that shares a lot of similarities with the USS Enterprise. Ship designer Mark Rademaker's  goal was to "motivate young people to pursue a STEM career," he told The Washington Post . Rather than relying on nuclear fusion or antimatter reactions, the IXS Enterprise takes advantage of a warp drive that,  according to io9 , would expand "empty space behind a starship [...] pushing the craft in a forward direction." The large rings around the spacecraft serve to form a "warp bubble" to reduce the energy requirements for the warp drive.

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Could we achieve interstellar travel using only known physics.

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The launch of Cassini, on October 15, 1997. This spectacular streak shot was taken from Hangar AF on ... [+] Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. For all of our history on Earth, the only way we've ever reached space is through the use of chemical-based fuels.

For as long as human beings have been watching the night sky, we’ve dreamed of visiting other worlds and truly seeing what’s out there in the Universe. While our chemical-based rockets have taken us to a myriad of planets, moons, and other bodies in the Solar System, the farthest spacecraft ever launched by humanity — Voyager 1 — is only 22.3 billion kilometers (13.9 billion miles) from Earth: just 0.056% of the distance to the closest known star system. With current technology, it would take close to 100,000 years to travel to another star system.

But there’s no need to restrict ourselves to doing things the way we’re doing them right now. With the right technology, we could vastly improve how efficient it is to get a large-payload mass, perhaps even one that carried humans on board, to unprecedented distances across the Universe. In particular, there are four technologies that have the potential to take us to the stars on much shorter timescales. Here’s how.

A nuclear-powered rocket engine, preparing for testing in 1967. This rocket is powered by ... [+] Mass/Energy conversion, and is underpinned by the famous equation E=mc^2. Although this concept has never led to a successful rocket, it could be the future of interstellar space travel.

1.) The nuclear option . At this point in human history, every rocket we’ve ever launched into space has one thing in common: it’s been propelled by chemical-based fuel. Yes, rocket fuel is a special mix of chemical fuels designed to maximize thrust, but the “chemical fuel” part is very important: it states that the reactions powering it rely on the rearrangement of bonds between various atoms to provide energy.

This is fundamentally limiting! For an atom, the overwhelming majority of its mass is in the atom’s nucleus: 99.95%. When you’re engaging in a chemical reaction, the electrons orbiting the atoms get rearranged, typically releasing somewhere around 0.0001% of the total mass of the atoms involved in the form of energy, via Einstein’s famous equation: E = mc² . That means, for every 1 kilogram of fuel you load up your rocket with, you’ll only get the energy equivalent of somewhere in the ballpark of 1 milligram of mass out of the reaction.

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Apple s iphone 16 pro design revealed in new leak, charlotte shooting 4 officers killed while serving warrant.

The preamplifiers of the National Ignition Facility are the first step in increasing the energy of ... [+] laser beams as they make their way toward the target chamber. NIF recently achieved a 500 terawatt shot - 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time. Nuclear fusion is thousands of times more efficient than any chemical-based reaction.

But if you went with a nuclear-based fuel , that story changes dramatically. Instead of relying on changing how electrons are configured and how atoms are bonded together, you could release comparatively enormous amounts of energy by altering how atomic nuclei themselves are bound to one another. When you split apart a Uranium atom by bombarding it with a neutron, it emits an enormous amount of energy compared to any chemical-based reaction: 1 kilogram of U-235 fuel can release the energy equivalent of 911 milligrams of mass, a factor of ~1000 times more efficient than chemical-based fuels.

If we were to master nuclear fusion instead, such as with an inertial-confinement fusion system that was capable of fusing hydrogen into helium — the same chain reaction that takes place in the Sun — we could become even more efficient. Fusing 1 kilogram of hydrogen fuel into helium would turn 7.5 grams of mass into pure energy, making it nearly 10,000 times as efficient as chemical-based fuels.

The key is that we’d be able to achieve the same accelerations for a rocket for far longer periods of time: hundreds or even thousands of times as long, enabling us to reach speeds hundreds or thousands of times greater than conventional rockets achieve today. It could cut the interstellar travel time down to mere centuries or perhaps even decades. It’s a promising avenue that might be achievable, depending on how the technology develops, before we hit the year 2100.

The DEEP laser-sail concept relies on a large laser array striking and accelerating a relatively ... [+] large-area, low-mass spacecraft. This has the potential to accelerate non-living objects to speeds approaching the speed of light, making an interstellar journey possible within a single human lifetime.

2.) A space-based laser array . This was the main idea behind the “ Breakthrough Starshot ” concept that gained notoriety a few years ago, and it remains an exciting concept. Whereas conventional spacecraft rely on bringing their own fuel on board and expending it to self-accelerate, the key idea at play here is that a large, high-powered laser array would provide the needed thrust to an external spacecraft. In other words, the source of the thrust would be separate from the spacecraft itself.

This is a fascinating concept, and a revolutionary one in many ways. Laser technology is successfully becoming not only more powerful, but more highly collimated as well, which means that if we can engineer a sail-like material that could reflect a high enough percentage of that laser light, we could use that laser blast to accelerate a spacecraft to tremendous speeds away from the source of our array. A ~1 gram-mass “starchip” could conceivably reach ~20% the speed of light, which would enable it to arrive at Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, in just 22 years.

The laser sail concept, for a starchip-style starship, does have the potential to accelerate a ... [+] spacecraft to about 20% the speed of light and reach another star within a human lifetime. It's possible that, with enough power, we could even send a crew-carrying spacecraft to span the interstellar distances.

Sure, we’d have to build a tremendous laser array: about 100 square kilometers’ worth of lasers, and we’d have to do it in space, but that’s a problem of cost, not science or technology. But there are technological problems that do need to be overcome for this to work, including:

• an unsupported sail will begin to rotate, and requires some sort of (undeveloped) stabilizing mechanism,
• the fact that there’s no way to decelerate once you make it to your destination, since there’s no on-board fuel,
• and even if you could scale it up to transport humans, the accelerations would be far too large — necessitating a large change in velocity over a short time — for a human to survive.

This technology could, perhaps, someday take us to the stars, but a successful plan to take humans up to ~20% the speed of light hasn’t yet come out.

The production of matter/antimatter pairs (left) from pure energy is a completely reversible ... [+] reaction (right), with matter/antimatter annihilating back to pure energy. We know how to create and destroy antimatter, using matter along with it to recover pure energy in a usable form, such as photons.

3.) Antimatter fuel . If we’re going to bring fuel with us, we might as well make it the most efficient fuel possible: matter-antimatter annihilations. Rather than chemical-based or even nuclear-based fuels, where only a portion of the mass brought on board gets converted to energy, a matter-antimatter annihilation would convert 100% of the mass of both matter and antimatter into energy. This is the ultimate in efficiency for fuel: the prospect of converting all of it into energy that could be used for thrust.

The difficulty comes only in practice, and in particular, on three fronts:

• the creation of stable, neutral antimatter,
• the ability to isolate it away from normal matter and precisely control it,
• and to produce it in large enough quantities that it could be useful for interstellar travel.

Excitingly enough, the first two challenges are already being overcome.

A portion of the antimatter factory at CERN, where charged antimatter particles are brought together ... [+] and can form either positive ions, neutral atoms, or negative ions, depending on the number of positrons that bind with an antiproton. If we can successfully capture and store antimatter, it would represent a 100% efficient fuel source, but many tons of antimatter, as opposed to the tiny fractions of a gram we've created, would be required for an interstellar journey.

At CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, there’s an enormous complex known as “the antimatter factory,” where at least six separate teams are researching the various properties of antimatter. They take antiprotons and slow them down, forcing positrons to bind with them: creating anti-atoms, or neutral antimatter.

They confine these anti-atoms in a vessel with alternating electric and magnetic fields, which effectively pin them in place, away from the container walls that are made of matter. At this point in time, mid-2020, they’ve successfully isolated and kept stable multiple anti-atoms for nearly an hour at the same time. At some point within the next few years, they’ll be good enough at this that they’ll be able to measure, for the first time, whether antimatter falls up or down in a gravitational field.

It’s not necessarily a near-term technology, but it could wind up being our fastest means of interstellar travel of all: an antimatter-driven rocket.

All rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel, but if a dark matter engine were created, new ... [+] fuel is always to be found simply by traveling through the galaxy. Because dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter (mostly) but passes right through it, you wouldn't have any difficulty collecting it in a specific volume of space; it would always be there as you moved through the galaxy.

4.) A spacecraft powered by dark matter . This one, admittedly, relies on an assumption about whatever particle is responsible for dark matter: that it behaves as a boson, making it its own antiparticle. In theory, dark matter that is its own antiparticle will have a small but non-zero chance of annihilating with any other dark matter particle it collides with, releasing energy that we could potentially leverage in the process.

There’s some potential evidence for this, as not only the Milky Way but other galaxies as well are observed to have an unexplained excess of gamma-rays coming from their galactic centers, where the dark matter density should be greatest. It’s always possible that there’s a mundane astrophysical explanation for this — such as pulsars — but it’s also possible that dark matter is annihilating with itself in the centers of galaxies, bringing up an incredible possibility: a dark matter-fueled spacecraft.

Our galaxy is thought to be embedded in an enormous, diffuse dark matter halo, indicating that there ... [+] must be dark matter flowing through the solar system. Although we have yet to detect dark matter directly, its abundant presence throughout our galaxy and beyond might provide a perfect recipe for the perfect rocket fuel imaginable.

The advantage of this is that dark matter is literally everywhere throughout the galaxy, meaning that we wouldn’t need to take fuel with us on a journey to wherever we went. Instead, a dark matter “reactor” could simply:

• take whatever dark matter happened to pass within it,
• either facilitate its annihilation or let it annihilate naturally,
• and redirect the exhaust to achieve thrust in whatever direction we desired,

and we could control the size and magnitude of the reactor to achieve the desired results.

Without the need for carrying fuel on-board, many of the problems of propulsion-driven space travel would become non-issues. Instead, we’d be able to achieve the ultimate dream of travel: unlimited constant acceleration. From the perspective of the spaceship itself, this would open up one of the most imaginative possibilities of all, the ability to reach any location in the Universe within a single human lifetime.

The travel time for a spacecraft to reach a destination if it accelerates at a constant rate of ... [+] Earth's surface gravity. Note that, given enough time at an acceleration of 1g, you can reach any location in the Universe within a single human lifetime.

If we restrict ourselves to current rocket technology, it will take tens of thousands of years — at minimum — to complete a journey from Earth to the nearest solar system beyond our own. But enormous advances in propulsion technologies are within reach, and could reduce that journey to within a single human lifetime. If we can master the use of nuclear fuel, of spaceborne laser arrays, of antimatter, or even of dark matter, we could realize our dream of becoming a spacefaring civilization without invoking physics-breaking technologies such as warp drive.

There are multiple potential avenues to turn what’s already been demonstrated as scientifically valid into a feasible, viable, next-generation propulsion technology. By the end of the century, it’s absolutely a possibility that a spacecraft that hasn’t been designed yet will overtake New Horizons, the Pioneer, and Voyager missions as the most distant objects from Earth. The science is already there. It’s up to us to look beyond the limitations of our current technologies and bring this dream to fruition.

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Every new generation of eyes sees a new version of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This Impressionistic swirl of color represents the churning magnetic fields in giant dust clouds near the center of the galaxy.

The map, painted in infrared wavelengths, reveals new details in a stretch of our galactic home 500 light-years wide.

The colors represent different temperatures of interstellar dust. Cool, dense dust is green; warmer dust is pink. The magnetic field lines, showing the direction of force, were undetectable before now.

The map is a first step toward understanding how magnetism can shape the universe.

The Magnetic Heart of the Milky Way

By Dennis Overbye

“The nation that controls magnetism will control the universe.” So maintained Dick Tracy, the fictional detective in the comic strip by Chester Gould, in 1962.

But does magnetism control the universe, too?

About seven stars are born each year in the Milky Way, our home galaxy. They come from dust and to dust they eventually return. Now, a celestial image, an Impressionistic swirl of color in the center of the Milky Way, represents a first step toward understanding the role of those magnetic fields in the cycle of stellar death and rebirth.

The image was produced by David Chuss, a physicist at Villanova University and an international team of astronomers. The project is known as FIREPLACE, for Far-InfraRed Polarimetric Large Area CMZ Exploration. The team’s map reveals previously invisible details in a stretch of the central Milky Way 500 light-years wide.

The colors represent different temperatures of interstellar dust: Green indicates cool, dense dust; pink indicates warmer dust. Threaded through these hues are lines showing the directions of magnetic force in the clouds. The yellow streaks are jets of hot ionized gas, which emits radio waves. The jets were first recorded two years ago by the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

Every new generation of eyes sees a new version of our galaxy.

To map the galaxy’s magnetic field lines, Dr. Chuss and his colleagues flew at 45,000 feet aboard the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, a 747 outfitted for astronomy. A special spectrograph measured the direction of polarization of the infrared light emanating from the dust, revealing the directions of the magnetic fields point by point.

The center of the Milky Way is barely noticeable to the right of center in the map, just below a small blob that resembles a sideways figure eight. At the middle of the dusty blob is a monster black hole, around which the entire galaxy rotates like a carousel.

“The next step is to figure out what this all means,” Dr. Chuss said in an interview. Embedded in this map could be clues to some of nature’s deepest, most complex processes, including how stars, the sources of all light and life in the universe, come to be.

“It will provide the ability for new theories to be tested,” Dr. Chuss said, “and guide the development of the next generation of astronomical exploration.”

Produced by Antonio de Luca and Elijah Walker . Image: Villanova University/Paré, Karpovich, Chuss (PI).

An earlier version of this article misidentified the academic affiliation of David Chuss, a physicist. It is Villanova University, not Vanderbilt University.

How we handle corrections

Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye

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A celestial image, an Impressionistic swirl of color in the center of the Milky Way, represents a first step toward understanding the role of magnetic fields  in the cycle of stellar death and rebirth.

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Everything you need to know about space tourism

Posted: April 4, 2024 | Last updated: April 4, 2024

Between floating in weightlessness, witnessing 16 sunrises a day and gazing into the infinite void, space travel sure sounds like an out-of-this-world experience. And now, it’s no longer a thing of the future.

That’s right, soon interstellar awe will be open to (almost) anyone, as billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are pushing the space tourism industry to a higher orbit.

What is space tourism?

Well, it’s almost like regular tourism: travel for recreational and leisure purposes… but in outer space. Some organizations like the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and the Citizens in Space project prefer to use the terms “personal spaceflight” or “citizen space exploration,” though.

In a nutshell, it’s space travel for non-astronauts.

Who can travel to space?

Anyone ! Well, that is, anyone with enough money. No need to have any previous science qualifications or NASA training, especially since a trained crew will escort tourists on their galactic journey.

According to Virgin Galactic, future space tourists will be between 10 and 90 years old, and come from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds.

The only thing you need? The desire to explore the universe!

What is orbital travel?

The main difference between orbital and suborbital flights lies in the trajectory and speed of the vessels.

To go into orbit, a rocket or spaceship needs to follow a path that goes around the Earth at the very fast minimum speed of 7.7 kilometres (4.8 miles) per second, in order to keep circling and never fall back down.

It allows astronauts and travellers to stay in space for extended periods of time, hence it is for now the preferred type of flight.

What is suborbital travel?

A suborbital flight , which is what Branson and Bezos did, “just” requires enough energy to blast off to space and then naturally fall back to Earth, making a huge arc.

It requires less energy and is less costly than orbital flights, thus opening doors for relatively affordable space tourism in the future.

Passengers would experience up to six minutes of weightlessness and a grandiose view.

How do you prepare?

Although Virgin Galactic doesn’t explicitly list its physical requirements, they did say astronauts would have to pass certain medical checkups and training programs. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has said that training for suborbital trips will only take a day.

And of course, any space tourist will also have to pass a series of thorough tests to determine whether they’re fit to fly up there.

Once in space, you may have to perform small bouts of exercise to prevent muscle wasting , which takes place after just seven days.

What is lunar tourism?

As its name hints, lunar tourism is the project of sending paying travellers to the moon. The first one could happen as soon as 2023, and would consist of a loop flight.

But three types of lunar tourism could be available in the near future: circumlunar trajectory, lunar orbit, and even lunar landing.

How cool would it be to say to someone, upon returning from a lunar vacation, “I’ve literally loved you to the moon and back”?

Where does space tourism take place?

Admittedly, space is a vast place. So where exactly would tourists go ?

First, any space travel begins with the Kármán line , which lies at 100 kilometres (62 miles) above sea level and is commonly accepted as the limit between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Then, there are several options: orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism.

Have touristic space travels already occurred?

Yes! From 2001 to 2009, the Russian space agency and the U.S.-based space tourism company Space Adventures took seven (very wealthy) members of the public for several orbital space travels to the International Space Station.

The flights took place aboard the famous spacecraft Soyuz but stopped in 2010, since the crew of actual astronauts grew bigger and left no more seats available for paying space tourists.

Who were the first space tourists?

The American businessman Dennis Tito became officially the first space tourist in April 2001, when he stayed for seven days on the International Space Station.

He was followed by six multimillionaire fellows from various countries: South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, American scientist Gregory Olsen, Iranian engineer Anousheh Ansari (the first female space tourist), Hungarian-American computer programmer Charles Simonyi, British video game mogul Richard Garriott, and Canadian businessman Guy Laliberté.

On July 11, 2021, billionaire Richard Branson, along with three Virgin Galactic employees and two pilots, reached an altitude of 85 kilometres (53 miles) above Earth aboard his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, the Unity. Less than 10 days later, on July 20, the world’s richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, briefly entered space on Blue Origin , his private space company’s reusable rocket. He was joined by his younger brother Mark, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen, and Wally Funk, who, at 82 years old, became the oldest astronaut.

Who would be the space tourism “agencies”?

Unlike past tourism experiments, which took place aboard vessels sent off for scientific purposes, future travels will happen on private companies’ flights set up solely for space tourism.

Those pioneering aerospace companies are Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic ; SpaceX, founded by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk ; and Blue Origin , created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

When will space tourism happen?

Sooner than you think. According to Forbes , Virgin Galactic’s successful trip means the company could start sending civilians up into space as soon as early 2022. Likewise, Blue Origin, which has a Federal Aviation Administration licence for human space travel through August 2021, could officially enter the space tourism game by early 2022.

How much will it cost?

It’s not exactly clear at the moment, but there have been some indications. For example, Virgin Galactic began selling ticket reservations for US$250,000 and sold roughly 600, before a test crash in 2014 brought sales to a halt. They’re expected to start selling tickets again in 2022, but at a much higher price.

It was reported in 2018 that seats on Bezos’s Blue Origin would also cost in the ballpark of US$200,000 to US$300,000, but that could change given how high demand is. At a recent auction, the winning bid for a seat aboard the company’s first spaceflight was a whopping US$28 million .

The bottom line is, those hoping to take a trip around the stars will either need to know someone or have hundreds of thousands (likely even millions) of dollars to spare.

How do we get there?

The development of space tourism vehicles is still an ongoing project.

But a few options already exist, like Virgin Galactic’s spaceplanes that can carry up to eight people, or SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft , launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard looks more like a regular rocket that takes off and lands vertically, but also claims to offer the biggest windows of any spacecraft—a good selling point. It comfortably sits six people and is fully autonomous, meaning no pilot onboard.

What does it feel like?

Needless to say, travelling to space is no walk in the park.

You’re eager to experience the joys of floating in microgravity? You better also get prepared to endure several physical discomforts: nausea and sea sickness, dizziness, headache, disorientation, puffy face, and bloodshot eyes.

But astronauts and previous space tourists agree that the body adjusts fairly quickly, getting used to its spatial environment in about three days.

Is it safe?

Safety is a reasonable concern , considering the many hazards involved in space travel: the probability of a crash, exposure to cosmic radiation, and even unknown dangers that could emerge with this new industry. But here is the real question for any adventurer: is the thrill worth the risk?

What is the food like?

For many tourists, food is a crucial criterion for a successful vacation. But outer space is no place for gourmets, at least not yet. Interstellar tourists can expect to enjoy mostly canned, modified, and pre-packaged meals (such as space burritos and freeze-dried ice cream). But soon, thanks to NASA’s veggie farm , space tourists might be able to savour space-grown salads.

What about the accommodations?

Orbital space travel allows you to stay up there for a few days or even weeks. At that point, you might want to stretch your legs outside of the spacecraft, right? Well, in the future, space stations could be used as hotels: the Genesis inflatable habitats by Bigelow Aerospace and the Space Island Project are existing examples. Make sure to book a room with a view of planet Earth!

How to pack a space suitcase?

Packing a suitcase for a trip through the cosmos is actually less of a headache than doing so for a weekend vacation on Earth. Just keep in mind that it’s impossible to do laundry in space, so pack clothes accordingly : stock up on underwear, light clothing (space station temperature is controlled at about 22 degrees Celsius, or 72 degrees Fahrenheit), and exercise outfits. Outerwear will be provided: an orange suit for takeoff and re-entry, and a white one for potential space strolls.

Is it eco-friendly?

With ecotourism being a growing trend and concern over the last few years, the question is legitimate. Well, bad news: space travel could have a negative impact by accelerating global warming . This would be caused by the black carbon released into the stratosphere after suborbital launches. But of course, entrepreneurs in the industry claim that the carbon footprint of space tourism would be minimal. The truth is, rockets emit 50 to 100 times more CO₂ per passenger than a regular flight. Considering that Virgin Galactic plans to do 400 trips per year, that’s a lot of CO₂ entering the atmosphere.

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Interstellar research: UI alum at NASA hosts space technology panel

University alumni Prasun Desai held a panel on Friday discussing NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and his journey while working at NASA for the past 33 years. 

The NASA STMD focuses on transforming future missions while ensuring American leadership in aerospace. Desai serves as a deputy associate administrator of the STMD, where he works with experts to define and invest in innovative space capabilities such as landing systems and advanced propulsion systems. 

“My journey of how I started where I am, was not planned and what I am doing now is something I swore I’d never do as my natural career but here I am at NASA Headquarters doing it,” Desai said. “It is a journey and as our organization is evolving, opportunities will arise because of that evolution, be open to those possibilities.”

NASA is divided into distinct mission directorates, and Desai helps coordinate and plan all of NASA’s next-generation space technologies through his role as deputy associate administrator of the NASA STMD. 

“I think 15 years ago was the last time I’ve been on campus after spending a number of years here getting my graduate degree,” Desai said. “We are actually as we speak, pivoting in how we organize and we think about making investments after 13 years and lessons learned and how we are looking to change and evolve.”

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In Desai’s role at the STMD, he also supports executive leadership, strategic planning and effective management for all elements of the space technology programs. The STMD has a $1.2 billion budget, and Desai helps coordinate the full range of space technology programs such as budget execution and formulation. 

Desai spoke about the human interest in visiting Mars, as rovers and landers have been present on the planet. Recent technology highlights, such as the LOFTID Inflatable Decelerator were discussed and the effects they could have on future exploration on the surface of Mars.

LOFTID’s demonstration of a large aeroshell involves the benefits of utilizing the inflatable decelerator design for space applications such as landing heavy payloads and landing at higher altitude locations. 

“If we want to send humans, which we as humans will do at some point due to the desire, we are trying to make that happen sooner rather than later,” Desai stated. “We are able to land a car right now, but we need to be able to land a house and because of the way the atmosphere is on Mars we are currently not able to do that.”

Desai has contributed to the development, design, analyses and flight operations of multiple innovative NASA missions. Such missions include the Mars Exploration Rover , Stardust and Genesis . 

The Space Technology Research Grants Program is an STMD program that accelerates the development of low TRL space technologies to support future space science and exploration that NASA or government agencies might need. 

“Space Technology Research Grants are how we really aim to go towards academia, the University of Illinois has been our second largest awardees,” Desai said. “We have 40 grants that we have worked with at the University of Illinois, we have 17 active right now.”

Desai has been honored with multiple awards from NASA for his contributions, including two Exceptional Engineering Achievement medals, an Exceptional Achievement medal, an Outstanding Leadership Medal, a Presidential Rank Award and an Exceptional Service Medal in recognition of his substantial impact during his tenure at NASA. He was bestowed with the 2005 National Engineer of the Year Award by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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Breaking news, space laser transmission strikes earth from 140 million miles away: nasa.

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This redefined a long-distance call.

Earth just received a laser transmission from a world- (and perhaps universe-) record-breaking 140 million miles away — which could have major implications for the future of space travel.

However, this correspondence wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin: It was actually sent by NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, which is currently located approximately 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft’s radio frequency comms system,” Meera Srinivasan, the project’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

This major breakthrough was achieved by using a Psyche feature called Deep Space Optical Communications, or DSOC, one of the droid’s several tasks per Space.com.

Its main directive is exploring 16 Psyche, the asteroid from which it takes its name.

NASA wanted to show the potential for laser communications to be conducted across interstellar distances, allowing for high bandwidth and a much speedier connection — from 10 to 100 times faster than what’s available today — between humans and the probes they send into space.

This achievement was particularly significant as, along with sending the laser message a record-breaking distance, NASA managed to transmit actual data gathered from the spacecraft.

“We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data,” explained Srinivasan. “Until then, we’d been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche.”

To wit, in November last year, Psyche sent back to Earth from 10 million miles away, but it was pre-loaded test data and not any “real” info.

This marked the culmination of a series of messages sent by the probe since it launched on October 13 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket.

During a dry run in December, Psyche beamed data back from 19 million miles away, sending it at the system’s maximum rate of 267 megabits per second.

This correspondence — which included footage of an orange tabby cat named Taters — took just over a minute and a half to reach Earth, which is comparable to broadband internet speeds.

By contrast, this latest DSOC transmission was only 25 megabits.

This was due to the fact that Psyche was seven times farther away, reducing the speed at which it could send and receive messages.

Despite the comparatively syrupy speed, this nonetheless eclipsed the project’s goal of “proving at least 1 Mbps was possible at that distance,” per the release.

This watershed moment provides a taste of how spacecraft “could use optical communications in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” NASA wrote.

Psyche is slated to fly by the Red Planet by 2026, whereupon it will fly toward its main destination, 16 Psyche, which it should reach by 2029.

Like the early pioneers’ search for the Northwest Passage, it will aim to map out this final frontier El Dorado, which contains enough precious metals to crash the gold market.

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Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

Spaceships of the future.

Hungary-based space illustrator Adrian Mann is a graphical engineer for Project Icarus, an effort to research the possibilities for interstellar travel. When scientists conceive of spaceships for travel to another star, most proposals require advanced and exotic propulsion mechanisms, including nuclear power and antimatter power. The following illustrations by Mann show some of the proposed concepts for vehicles to take us beyond the solar system.

Saturn Rockets

During the Apollo program, NASA investigated many options for uprating the Saturn V, from stretching the 1st stage to adding enormous solid rocket boosters, and even a nuclear powered upper stage – NERVA – that could be used for missions to Mars.

NERVA Spacecraft

Two nuclear powered NERVA spacecraft being assembled in orbit, with the crew being ferried with an early design space shuttle, for the journey to Mars.

Orion Spacecraft

The Saturn V could also have carried an Orion spacecraft to orbit. Powered by nuclear explosions, the Orion spacecraft leaves orbit for Mars.

Orion Mars Spacecraft

The Orion Mars spacecraft shown here has a crew accommodation section, 2 Mars landers in the form of lifting bodies, and enough small nuclear devices to propel the ship to and from Mars.

Given the colossal power of nuclear explosions, enormous Orion ships were envisaged, to be launched from remote desert areas such as Jackass Flats in the Nevada Test Range.

Bussard Funnel

The major problem with trying to devise a ship to travel between the stars is that of fuel. Robert Bussard devised a ship that would use a huge magnetic funnel to collect hydrogen from space to use as fuel in an interstellar ramjet.

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Bussard Funnel Thrust

While Bussard's spacecraft concept looks appealing, calculations have shown that the thrust of the engine may not be enough to overcome drag caused by the magnetic funnel.

Daedelus Complete

During the early 1970s, a team from the British Interplanetary Society carried out the world’s first serious engineering study of an interstellar vehicle – Project Daedalus.

Daedelus in Flight

Daedalus was conceived as a two-stage vehicle, which would attain a speed of 12 percent of the speed of light, for a 50-year voyage to reach Barnard's Star.

Daedelus and Saturn V

Weighing in at 60,000 tons when fully fuelled, Daedalus would dwarf even the Saturn V rocket.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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