Despite the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot pledge, public accounting shows less than $10 million spending. Philip Lubin (UC Santa Barbara, laser propulsion) received ~$200,000 over eight years. This was less than his NASA grants for similar work. There is an estimate of 30 contracts totaling $4.5 million. Scientists viewed this as a kickstart. Breakthrough’s name …
If we are sending manned interstellar missions to other star systems, it becomes very hard to keep masses and power levels nearly reasonable. Interstellar travel missions really work out better after humanity has scaled up overall human power levels by a thousand or even a million times by industrializing the solar system. Various anticipated propulsion …
The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) declared three winners of the Project Hyperion Design Competition. Teams designed a generation ship—a crewed interstellar spacecraft designed for a 250-year journey to a habitable planet. The teams designed habitats of such a spacecraft that would allow a society to sustain itself and flourish in a highly resource-constrained environment. …
Laser pushed sails—ultrathin need reflective structures that are square meters but weight a gram. If the sails and the payload each weigh a gram, such a spacecraft could accelerate to one fifth of the speed of light. This would be 200 times faster than the Voyager probe. Richard Norte of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, …
AI gives a thumbs up to Brett Bellmore innovative modifications to Robert Zubrin’s Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR). Switching from water to polyethene and storing in sausage strings could enhance its performance and safety, particularly focusing on avoiding criticality during storage, minimizing parasitic mass, and addressing practical challenges like micrometeorite protection and fuel state. Robert …
Project Hyperion explores the feasibility of crewed interstellar travel via generation ships, using current and near-future technologies. A generation ship is a hypothetical spacecraft designed for long-duration interstellar travel, where the journey may take centuries to complete. The idea behind a generation ship is that the initial crew would live, reproduce, and die on the …
Barry-1 has 2 Quantum Drives: QD1 (Blue Arrow, internal) & QD1-TC (Green Arrow). Both are designed to produce thrust in the same direction (Red Arrow). QD1-TC is expected to produce about 2x the thrust of QD-1. CEO Richard Mansell said it has two drives a 0.25mN and a 0.65mN drive. The DARPA funding (2018-2022 Quantized …
Background: According to standard physics we cannot travel to the stars in a human lifetime because we need impractical amounts of fuel to get close to light speed. However, a new theory of inertia has been proposed called Quantized Inertia (QI). It predicts standard inertia, as a vacuum effect, at normal accelerations. It also predicts …
Nextbigfuture has a weekly video review of the big stories in science and technology. The later part of the video discusses laser pushed sails for fast missions around the solar system and then interstellar missions. We have the laser technology that is sufficient to be used for laser pushed sail missions. They need to be …
Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century and a NASA NIAC phase 1 study wants to work out the additional issues to coordinate several thousands one gram solar sails into a coordinated mission that can communicate back to Earth from …
There are many people who have the opinion about interstellar travel being impossible. They are looking at our current immature economy and immature space capability. They then extrapolate about some one off interstellar mission. We need to look at how humanity broke out of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea with a fleet of exploration ships. …