AU ZERO TAKES AIM AT INTERSTELLAR PROPULSION
Guest contributor Paul Gilster explains how interstellar spaceflight may become a reality.
- Mon Jan 10, 2011 04:00 AM ET
Content provided by Paul Gilster, Tau Zero Foundation and Project Icarus Consultant
3 Comments | Leave a Comment
Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from the sun. Click to enlarge this image.
Image courtesy of Adrian Mann
Image courtesy of Adrian Mann
Guest contributor Paul Gilster is a founding member of the Tau Zero Foundation, a non-profit group of scientists dedicated to the incremental advancement of interstellar spaceflight. Project Icarus, one of the Foundation's key initiatives, has reached a major milestone and Paul shares this exciting project with Discovery News. Paul also maintains Centauri Dreams, the news forum of the Tau Zero Foundation.
Marc Millis steeples his fingers, leaning back in his chair to ponder a question from one of the practitioner scientists of the Tau Zero Foundation.
He's in Austin, Texas, for a session devoted to roughing-out ideas and organization plans for the young organization with an ambitious goal: Build a practical groundwork for interstellar flight within sound, peer-reviewed physics; establish the basics that will one day lead -- whether in decades or centuries -- to technologies that can take us to the stars.
The blackboard is littered with his organizational chart, arrows connecting boxes, people attached to study groups. Solar sails, fusion, ion drives -- they're all up for discussion.
Is any idea more packed with raw adventure than interstellar flight? You would think not, judging from the public enthusiasm for space dramas like "Star Trek" and "Avatar," and for many the assumption that large, well financed teams are working on interstellar propulsion is a natural.
Millis, himself a bit of a "Star Trek" buff, would have thought so too if he hadn't been working for NASA in the 1990s, where he headed up the effort known as the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project (BPP). Well financed? Not exactly -- BPP's entire budget ran to $1.6 million, covering the period 1996 to 2002. Large? Hardly, but Millis and colleagues achieved much.
Consider this: In addition to a 1997 workshop covering a wide range of cutting-edge concepts, BPP sponsored five research tasks through competitive selection, two in-house tasks and one grant, spawning sixteen peer-reviewed journal articles, an award-winning website called "Warp Drive When," and related research coordinated with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).
Millis investigated everything from theories of transient inertia to so-called "quantum tunneling." Targeting propulsion breakthroughs from physics, BPP complemented MSFC's work but with the focus on the most visionary ideas and the need for credible progress toward such goals.
Interstellar Speed Bumps
Coupled with NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, BPP gave for a brief time the impression that the major space agencies were in the interstellar propulsion game, at least marginally, a thought that went hand in glove with then NASA administrator Dan Goldin's 1997 call for a robotic probe that could reach another star. "We have to set goals so tough it hurts," said Goldin then, "that it drives technology -- in semiconductors, materials, simulation, propulsion."
Goldin's was a clarion call, but despite an initial burst of enthusiasm, the magnitude of the task, not to mention budgetary realities, soon set in. NASA had more immediate goals, and by 2002, BPP had been canceled, followed by the Institute for Advanced Concepts in 2007. Like its fellow space agencies worldwide, NASA had little time or money to devote to interstellar issues.
The truth about interstellar studies is that it is now what it has largely remained since the first tentative papers from the likes of Eugen Sänger, Les Shepherd and Robert Forward made it clear more than fifty years ago that a trip to another star might be possible.
Researchers work in relative isolation, communicating only occasionally at conferences and now on the Internet. Despite a few small government efforts at NASA and the European Space Agency, the interstellar field today is a network of independent scientists eager to do their work but usually lacking the funding to proceed.
That's why interstellar studies is now trying the private sector.
A frustrated Millis, fired-up with ideas and unable to implement them, retired early from his position at NASA's Glenn Research Center to launch the Tau Zero Foundation, where he began to assemble an informal network of practitioner scientists whose previous work had demonstrated their interest in cutting edge ideas.
Centauri Dreams became its forum, a gathering place for news and analysis of recent papers on interstellar matters. Credible, near-term work was what Tau Zero would be about, by which Millis meant incremental steps toward a goal whose fruition might be as much as several centuries off. Tau Zero wasn't meant to promote wild, untested ideas, but to use philanthropic donations to support serious, peer-reviewed science in support of a long-range goal.
Small Steps to Icarus
Think of the method as chipping away at a concept that sometimes seems intractable, for neither Millis nor any of his practitioners can say for sure whether starflight will ever happen. But the effort continues, "ad astra incrementis," as the motto for Tau Zero that Millis created would have it. "To the stars in steps, with each small step being larger than the one before."
Or as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "You achieve the great thing by a series of small steps."
Making those steps happen is a foundation set up from the start as a networked, distributed entity, a fact that allowed Tau Zero quickly to pool its efforts with the British Interplanetary Society in the ongoing effort to re-think Project Daedalus, a fusion-based starship design the BIS had compiled in the 1970s.
Daedalus was outrageously ambitious, but its designers put together what, if we had the means to build it, would be the most likely design to get an interstellar probe to another star, in this case Barnard’s Star, some 6 light years away.
Project Icarus, a five year study that has just completed its first year, investigates what the last thirty years of technology development have made possible for an unmanned interstellar probe. But missions closer at hand are also in their conceptualization and design phase.
A precursor mission called FOCAL is the brain-child of Italian physicist Claudio Maccone. FOCAL is envisioned as an attempt to reach the Sun's gravitational focus at 550 AU and beyond, where astrophysical studies using the enormous resolution that such lensing affords could offer us priceless information about the cosmic microwave background and nearby stellar systems.
Image: The solar focal point is located at about 550 AU from the sun. Image courtesy of Adrian Mann.
Maccone is also moving ahead with a "statistical Drake equation" that advances Frank Drake's original thinking on the spread of extraterrestrial civilizations with new statistical considerations.
Also on the agenda is education, in the form of Tibor Pacher's Faces from Earth, an attempt to promote deep space missions by designing messages that future craft could carry onboard, much as Pioneer and Voyager carried their own plaques and records of humanity.
A Continuum of Ideas
The related Mosaic Earth is all about building images of our planet using portraits of the people participating in the project, emphasizing Pacher's belief that reaching out to another civilization, if only in the form of a time capsule aboard a spacecraft, is a deeply human endeavor.
But not all Tau Zero work focuses on near-term technologies. Unlike BPP, Tau Zero works with a continuum of ideas, from near-term concepts like solar sails to the futuristic physics of wormholes and so-called "warp drive."
In 2009, Millis and colleague Eric Davis published "Frontiers of Propulsion Science," the first scholarly text compiling breakthrough propulsion concepts of the kind BPP once specialized in, with eighteen different lead authors providing chapters in a 739 page volume that identifies critical issues and describes future research directions. If there’s a "Star Trek" edge to some of this work, it comes infused with the credentials of well qualified scientists.
"We thought it was science fiction. Then we visited NASA." So goes the sub-title to a 2001 article on BPP that appeared under the title "Warp Speed Gets Real" in Popular Science. The bright promise of that cover story was quickly belied by project cancellations at NASA, but the Tau Zero Foundation intends to adapt to changing circumstances, especially the infusion of commercial activity into space projects that have always been in the hands of government.
As to Millis, he's meeting with Tau Zero practitioners, revamping the Tau Zero public website, developing practitioner online venues for communication and pushing the interstellar goal through a series of speaking engagements.
Soon to move to a membership format, the restructuring Tau Zero Foundation carries what he believes to be humanity's best hope for pushing technology to its limits within sound, peer-reviewed research constraints. The goal is long-term and, in the minds of Tau Zero supporters, doable if we begin to isolate the problems of interstellar flight and work creatively to envision solutions that may pay off for our posterity.
And if a breakthrough comes along sooner than that? So much the better. "Ad astra incrementis" is a purposely cautious motto, but it has always been the business of the future to surprise us.
No comments:
Post a Comment