Bill Clinton Backs 100 Year Starship Program

[bananas]

http://news.discovery.com/space/100yss-former-president-bill-clinton-backs-100-year-starship-120905.html

Former U.S. President Backs 100 Year Starship
Analysis by Ian O'Neill
Wed Sep 5, 2012

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On Sept. 13, an international group of big thinkers will descend on Houston, Texas, to discuss one very big idea: making interstellar travel possible within the next 100 years.

The 100 Year Starship Project (100YSS) was seeded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative, and earlier this year it was announced that ex-NASA astronaut Mae Jemison and the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence would head the project. Icarus Interstellar Inc. (a non-profit organization co-founded by Richard Obousy in the aim of developing technologies for interstellar travel), SETI Institute and Foundation for Enterprise Development were also tapped to join the multi-partner project to develop the technical, cultural, legal and financial frameworks for a manned mission to another star.

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Former President Bill Clinton has even stepped in to serve as the symposium's Honorary Chair. In a statement, Clinton said: "This important effort helps advance the knowledge and technologies required to explore space, all while generating the necessary tools that enhance our quality of life on earth."

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[a geek named Bob]

1. sounds good

I hope they also are working on speeding up exploration, settlement, and mining operations a little closer than another star...

[struggle4progress]

2. Um ... Proxima Centauri is over 4 LY away: so to send a signal to a probe at Proxima Centauri

and get a reply back will take about 8.5 years

If the probe's onboard camera sends a picture showing that the probe is on a collision course with an asteroid orbiting Proxima Centauri, the picture arrives 4 years after the collision

[DetlefK]

3. There is something called "Artificial Intelligence".

We have soccer-playing robots, we have neuronal networks that can predict sales of products better than seasoned employees, we have support-vector-machines that sift through the MASSIVE amounts of data that CERN produces and find sense in it...

Coding and educating the AI for an interstellar spaceship shouldn't take longer than 10 or 20 years.

The brainpower isn't the problem. Getting there is the problem: It would take at least a few centuries of interstellar flight to get to Proxima Centauri. And we don't know anything yet about the interstellar medium (radiation, gas-density...), because Voyager I has just reached its edge.

[Posteritatis]

4. Collision avoidance in deep space isn't exactly challenging these days. (nt)

[struggle4progress]

5. Dunno. If one wanted to send a device to Proxima Centauri, and to have the device arrive

within a hundred years, the device has to travel on average every minute at least 502000 miles -- almost twice the distance from the earth to the moon

For comparative purposes: a mosquito, traveling at such a speed, has about the kinetic energy of a small truck at 70 mph

So during the trip through deep space, you can't afford to collide with anything that has as much mass as a mosquito, because the collision would total the equipment

But the probe is going 502000 miles a minute -- so you have to scan far out along the trajectory and along alternate trajectories to avoid very tiny obstacles: the probability of encountering one, of course, is small -- but the cost of any encounter is ruin

[Phoonzang]

6. One proposal I saw involved a strong, yet lightweight, disk

or shield placed a good distance in front of the spacecraft. The disk should absorb the energy of debris collisions (within reason) without transferring much of it back to the main craft. Once the ship gets it's destination, assuming it's a one way trip, you jettison the disk.