Nasa's Interstellar travel research underway

[vincent]

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 voyage is 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.

Space.com

Edited March 23, 2011 by Growled
Shortened article length

[winrez]

Sweetness I hope its completed in my lifetime

[DocM]

Another PowerPoint project'whose monies are better spent elsewhere. The response on space forums is giggles & rolleyes.

[neoadorable]

not true Doc, a mill is nothing and these dreams are what will get us there. i do however sense someone's been spending too much time watching the Venture Star from Avatar...and i agree we should focus on getting to in-system destinations first. Moon, Mars, Venus, asteroids, Titan, heliopause observer...then shoot out to Proxima Centaury. but it never hurts to start planning early. you shooting these guys down is like people telling old Werner back in the 40's to shut up about going to Mars. look at the result.

[DocM]

If you had seen as many of these as I have you'd be cynical top, especially after Vision for Space Exploration and Constellation.

[neoadorable]

i know, i know, it's mostly a lot of talk an hot air and not much action, like i often say, NASA has more cabinets than IKEA for all of their shelved plans, but still...everything has to start with a dream. i do realize that the Bush era promises haven't really amounted to much...this isn't a complaint against Bush as it's of the system we have, which never seems to see beyond the next elections/administrative horizon.

[DocM]

Agreed

And NewSpace has picked up a lot of their abandoned ideas and run with them

Dream Chaser started as NASA's HL-20, a replacement gor the shuttle, but was canceled & sold.

Prometheus started as a candidate for NASA's canceled Orbital Space Plane project.

Bigelow's modules started as NASA's TransHab ISS module, but it was defunded & sold. Bigelow has really run with, and greatly improved, this tech.

The VASIMR plasma rocket started as a project invented by an astronaut-physicist at NASA but was defunded, so Franklin Chang Diaz did it on his own.

and so on. There's a message there: do COTS based development where ever possible and fund NASA in 5 year budgets. Otherwise the unpredictability kills a lot of great ideas.

[neoadorable]

definitely. in the long term the private sector is the way to go. just look at the RDA and all they've achieved in Alpha Centaury. sorry, too much Ultimate Extended Final Cut Director's Edition on Blu-ray for me...it's a phase.

[HawkMan]

Agreed

And NewSpace has picked up a lot of their abandoned ideas and run with them

Dream Chaser started as NASA's HL-20, a replacement gor the shuttle, but was canceled & sold.

Prometheus started as a candidate for NASA's canceled Orbital Space Plane project.

Bigelow's modules started as NASA's TransHab ISS module, but it was defunded & sold. Bigelow has really run with, and greatly improved, this tech.

The VASIMR plasma rocket started as a project invented by an astronaut-physicist at NASA but was defunded, so Franklin Chang Diaz did it on his own.

and so on. There's a message there: do COTS based development where ever possible and fund NASA in 5 year budgets. Otherwise the unpredictability kills a lot of great ideas.

The question is, if NASA hadn't footed the bill to to the initial costly research and development into these things and then sold them at a bare fraction of what they spent on them to recoup a bit. would these private companies ever have been able to afford to develop them from scratch ? unlikely.

[DocM]

Doesn't matter at this point - it's been proven rather conclusivelh that NASA/Govt. doesn't have the cost control or stick-to-it-iveness that NewSpace has. Passion, vertical integration and not having govt unions to deal with matters.

Also too much bureauracy, fear of doing the different, what have you. I've worked in govt, and it's the same problem be it NASA, health care (my main area) or what have you. Mind numbing.

This is why many feel NASA should become an idea factory with implementation being done under the CCDev/COTS/Space Agreement models that Dragon, Dream Chaser, VASIMR, Bigelow are using. Falcon 9/Dragon is a great example: <$1B in total costs to develop, about the rounding error of a NASA program like Ares I/Orion where they've sunk $30B and have nothing to show.

[HawkMan]

Would have been better if they had spent those money on developing the unmanned lifting body spaceplane shuttle replacement NASA dropped instead of more rickets though.

[Solid Knight]

They need to make a space elevator first.

[DocM]

Space Elevator has proven to be theoretically possible but technologically infeasible - even with carbon nanotubes.

Nature Journal....

The space elevator: going down?

Study shows that proposed carbon nanotube cables won't hold up.

Is it possible to make a cable for a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes? Not anytime soon, if ever, says Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. Pugno's calculations show that inevitable defects in the nanotubes mean that such a cable simply wouldn't be strong enough.

The idea of a space elevator was popularized in science fiction, where writers envisioned a 100,000-kilometre-long cable stretching straight up from the Earth's surface and fixed in a geosynchronous orbit. Payloads, or tourists, would simply ascend the cable into low-Earth orbit, eliminating the need for rocket launches.

When carbon nanotubes were discovered to have an incredibly high strength-to-weight ratio, researchers hoped they would take the idea out of fiction and bring it into reality.

But Pugno argues that atomic-scale defects in the nanotubes would reduce the strength of such a giant cable by at least 70%.

>

Recent measurements of high-quality nanotubes have found them to be missing one carbon atom out of every 10^12 bonds; that's about one defect over 4 micrometres of nanotube length. Defects of two or more missing atoms are much more rare, but Pugno points out that on the scale of the space elevator they become statistically probable.

>

[neoadorable]

just make the cable stronger. it can definitely be done. just a matter of money.