NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

[KRonn]

 

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/24/nasas-100-year-starship-project-sets-sights-interstellar-travel/?test=faces

NASA's 100-Year Starship Project Sets Sights on Interstellar Travel

Shooting for the stars will first require a lot of down-to-Earth elbow grease, as NASA's new 100-Year Starship project illustrates. The effort, to journey between stars in the 2100s, began with a workshop and now is in the study phase.

NASA's Ames Research Center and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are collaborating on the $1 million 100-Year Starship Study, an effort to take the first step in the next era of space exploration.

The study will scrutinize the business model needed to develop and mature technologies needed to enable long-haul human space treks a century from now. Kick-started by a strategic planning workshop in January, the project has brought together more than two dozen farsighted futurists, NASA specialists, science fiction writers, foundation aficionados and educators.



But for the moment, put aside all those Vulcan mind melds and get a grip. Launching a truly interstellar human voyageis a goal that will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources.

"The year-long study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed," according to DARPA thinkers.

Self-sustaining enterprise

Dave Neyland, director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, said that the 100-Year Starship name was chosen because it would require a long-range sustainable effort to get our species to other stars.

"Looking at history, most significant exploration, like crossing oceans or continents for the first time, was sponsored by patrons or groups outside of government," Neyland said in a DARPA statement. [Video: Warp Drive and Wormholes]

Neyland said that the focus of the endeavor is to identify a mechanism that gets such a long-range project "out of the government, and make sure it is an energized and self-sustaining enterprise."

The mission of the workshop was to steer efforts to develop a business model, establish a charter and develop the organizational construct needed to affect a long-term strategy. Over the course of two days, participants met and thrashed out the requirements for seeding research that would enable interstellar flight. Planning is underway for follow on-activities, with the study scheduled for completion by the end of 2011.

The long-haul starship plan

One participant in the workshop was former NASA scientist Marc Millis, a leading authority on breakthrough propulsion physics concepts that might make interstellar hops a doable proposition.

"The meeting and the DARPA funding is about creating an organization that could last for 100-years, rather than about the technological and sociological advancements necessary toeventually create starships," Millis said. "In fact, the funding is not allowed to be spent on any research or educational activities related to interstellar flight, but instead can only be used to define that organization. As much as I really like the name, '100-year starship,' this study should instead be called the '100-year organization study.'"

Millis pointed out that the overall goal of the organization is to sustain research that will lead to the creation of a starship in roughly 100-years, and to inspire students along the way. By asking "why-what-how," it was hoped to flesh out some substance to define that organization, he said.

An interstellar challenge

"I find this new initiative to be more of a self-serving earmark using good-old-boy networking," Millis told SPACE.com of the study.

He said leaders of the new study need to first consider what other organizations have done in the past and are now accomplishing, such as the Tau Zero Foundation, the British Interplanetary Society and The Planetary Society.

Millis said that, as head of the Tau Zero Foundation, he picked the topic of interstellar flight "to seek game-changing advancements beyond what others even contemplate and to operate beyond the entrapments of all the competition and legacy constraints of nearer-Earth space activities. And now those entrapments are encroaching into the progress being made on interstellar flight."

"I challenge DARPA/Ames to a fair and open competition," Millis said. "If given the same amount of funding, labor, and time, let's see who can make more progress toward the real challenges of interstellar flight!" [Vote: The Greatest Space Innovators of the 21st Century]

Unforeseen breakthroughs

Another workshop attendee was Harry Kloor, an author, scientist and science technology consultant whose has written for "Star Trek: Voyager." Kloor said there should be no rush for the project, but that its aim should be true.

"There are a lot of steps between now and then," Kloor told SPACE.com. "Nobody came forward with the idea that we won't be trying to reach for the stars. If you don't aim for it, how are you ever going to hit the target?"

Kloor's crystal ball calls for unforeseen breakthroughs ... be they in medicine, communications, lifespan extension, radiation survival, data transport, even energy generation.

"Also, I'm banking on within five years, 10 years at the most, that we will find nearby, say within 20 light-years, an Earth-like planet."

Given such an eye-opening discovery, Kloor said that public consciousness will change. By finding such a nearby habitable world, humanity could then start to envisage the feasibility of a stellar trek.

"It will be the same as when people were imagining what's on the other side of our world," Kloor said.

Kloor considers interstellar travel a necessity.

"If we don't eventually spread out – I'm not saying tomorrow or even 100 years – but if we don't get off planet it is inevitable that we would go extinct, just like the dinosaurs," Kloor said. "Either a natural or unnatural event will occur that will wipe us out."

In terms of the recent 100-Year Starship study strategic planning workshop, Kloor saw the gathering as laying the seeds of future efforts that could lead to something.

"The point of the workshop," Kloor concluded, "was to start the conversation moving forward."

Video: Warp Drive and Wormholes

Vote Now: 21st Century's Greatest Space Innovators

'Star Trek's' Warp Drive Is Not Impossible
http://www.space.com/6649-star-trek-warp-drive-impossible.html

[KRonn]

 

http://www.space.com/6649-star-trek-warp-drive-impossible.html

The warp drive, one of Star Trek's hallmark inventions, could someday become science instead of science fiction.

Some physicists say the faster-than-light travel technology may one day enable humans to jet between stars for weekend getaways. Clearly it won't be an easy task. The science is complex, but not strictly impossible, according to some researchers studying how to make it happen.

The trick seems to be to find some other means of propulsion besides rockets, which would never be able to accelerate a ship to velocities faster than that of light, the fundamental speed limit set by Einstein's General Relativity.

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Luckily for us, this speed limit only applies within space-time (the continuum of three dimensions of space plus one of time that we live in). While any given object can't travel faster than light speed within space-time, theory holds, perhaps space-time itself could travel.

"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving."

Already happened?

One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang.

"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?" Millis said.

To make the technique feasible, scientists will have to think of some creative new means of propulsion to move space-time rather than a spaceship.

According to General Relativity, any concentration of mass or energy warps space-time around it (by this reasoning, gravity is simply the curvature of space-time that causes smaller masses to fall inward toward larger masses).

So perhaps some unique geometry of mass or exotic form of energy can manipulate a bubble of space-time so that it moves faster than light-speed, and carries any objects within it along for the ride.

"If we find some way to alter the properties of space-time in an imbalanced fashion, so behind the spacecraft it's doing one thing and in front of it it's doing something else, will then space-time push on the craft and move it?" Millis said. This idea was first proposed in 1994 by physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

In the lab

Already some studies have claimed to find possible signatures of moving space-time. For example, scientists rotated super-cold rings in a lab. They found that still gyroscopes placed above the rings seem to think they themselves are rotating simply because of the presence of the spinning rings beneath. The researchers postulated that the ultra-cold rings were somehow dragging space-time, and the gyroscope was detecting the effect.

Other studies found that the region between two parallel uncharged metal plates seems to have less energy than the surrounding space. Scientists have termed this a kind of "negative energy," which might be just the thing needed to move space-time.

The catch is that massive amounts of this negative energy would probably be required to warp space-time enough to transport a bubble faster than light speed. Huge breakthroughs will be needed not just in propulsion but in energy. Some experts think harnessing the mysterious force called dark energy — thought to power the acceleration of the universe's expansion — could provide the key.

Even though it's a far cry between these preliminary lab results and actual warp drives, some physicists are optimistic.

"We still don't even know if those things are possible or impossible, but at least we've progressed far enough to where there are things that we can actually research to chip away at the unknowns," Millis told SPACE.com. "Even if they turn out to be impossible, by asking these questions, we're likely to discover things that otherwise we might overlook."

         Video - Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet?

         Video: Can We Time Travel?

         Top 10 Star Trek Technologies

[Ed Anger]

Ed's prediction: Proxmired

[Caliga]

Proxmire.

[Ed Anger]

Proxmire.

I love all these threads about fantastical plans for spacecraft or wizbang weapons. We all know what is going to happen.

No funding or canceled a few years in. Watching Timmay's heart shatter is worth it.

[jimmy olsen]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

[Ed Anger]

Sure. Just like I have a jetpack, flying car and live in a city on the moon.

[garbon]

Sure. Just like I have a jetpack, flying car and live in a city on the moon.

And you didn't let me come? Bastard!

[Eddie Teach]

One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang.

"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?" Millis said.

This is how the world will end. 

[Neil]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

Are you kidding?  Manned space exploration is pretty much finished.  Your people can't fund that anymore.

[jimmy olsen]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

Are you kidding?  Manned space exploration is pretty much finished.  Your people can't fund that anymore.

The costs of those programs are in the hundreds of millions, not the billions. Even a midlevel European power could afford them.

[Neil]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

Are you kidding?  Manned space exploration is pretty much finished.  Your people can't fund that anymore.

The costs of those programs are in the hundreds of millions, not the billions. Even a midlevel European power could afford them.

Could, but won't.

[DGuller]

Sure. Just like I have a jetpack, flying car and live in a city on the moon.

And you didn't let me come? Bastard!

TMI.

[jimmy olsen]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

Are you kidding?  Manned space exploration is pretty much finished.  Your people can't fund that anymore.

The costs of those programs are in the hundreds of millions, not the billions. Even a midlevel European power could afford them.

Could, but won't.

Why not? Those first two programs are a drop of water in the vast ocean that's the defense budget and they convey immense improvements in capabilities.

VASIMR will be tested on the ISS and if it succeeds it will certainly be used, if not on manned missions then certainly on unmanned ones.

[Tonitrus]

Railguns, Lasers, Vasimr are all making strides lately. They will be mission ready by the end of the decade and won't even cost that much.   

Are you kidding?  Manned space exploration is pretty much finished.  Your people can't fund that anymore.

The costs of those programs are in the hundreds of millions, not the billions. Even a midlevel European power could afford them.

Hungary would have no use for a railgun.