Larry Klaes began developing a following for his deep dives into science fiction cinema long ago on Centauri Dreams, through memorable looks at films like The Thing from Another World, Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Although he delves into recent films as well, Larry’s frequent focus on the 1950s always intrigues me, as he places these movies in the context of our developing, rapidly changing ideas about the spacefaring future. How did our views of space travel change over time as we went from Sputnik to Apollo, and where are they heading today? All of that is a subtext in ..read more

If space is infused with ‘dark energy,’ as seems to be the case, we have an explanation for the continuing acceleration of the universe’s expansion. Or to speak more accurately, we have a value we can plug into the universe to make this acceleration happen. Exactly what causes that value remains up for grabs, and indeed frustrates current cosmology, for something close to 70 percent of the total mass-energy of the universe needs to be comprised of dark energy to make all this work. Add on the mystery of ‘dark matter’ and we actually see only some 4 percent of the cosmos. So there’s a lot out t ..read more

Rocket Lab, a launch service provider based in Long Beach CA, launched a rideshare payload on April 23 from its launch complex in New Zealand. I’ve been tracking that launch because aboard the Electron rocket was an experimental solar sail that NASA is developing to study boom deployment. This is important stuff, because the lightweight materials we need to maximize payload and performance are evolving, and so are boom deployment methods. Hence the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), created to text composites and demonstrate new deployment methods. The thing about sails is that they ..read more

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Although it’s been quite some time since I’ve written about Voyager, our two interstellar craft (and this is indeed what they are at present, the first to return data from beyond the heliosphere) are never far from my mind. That has been the case since 1989, when I stayed up all night for the Neptune encounter and was haunted by the idea that we were saying goodbye to these doughty travelers. Talk about naivete! Now that I know as many people in this business as I do, I should have realized just how resilient they were, and how focused on keeping good science going from deep space. Not to ment ..read more

Radio and optical SETI look for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations even though we have no evidence that such exist. The search is eminently worthwhile and opens up the ancillary question: How would a transmitting civilization produce a signal strong enough for us to detect it at interstellar distances? Beacons of various kinds have been considered and search strategies honed to find them. But we’ve also begun to consider new approaches to SETI, such as detecting technosignatures in our astronomical data (Dyson spheres, etc.). To this mix we can now add a consideration of gravitational ..read more

The propulsion technology the human characters conceive in the Netflix version of Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem clearly has roots in the ideas we’ve been kicking around lately. I should clarify that I’m talking about the American version of the novel, which Netflix titles ‘3 Body Problem,’ and not the Chinese 30-part series, which is also becoming available. In the last two posts, I’ve gone through various runway concepts, in which a spacecraft is driven forward by nuclear explosions along its route of flight. We’ve also looked at pellet options, where macroscopic pellets are fired ..read more

Fusion runways remind me of the propulsion methods using pellets that have been suggested over the years in the literature. Before the runway concept emerged, the idea of firing pellets at a departing spacecraft was developed by Clifford Singer. Aware of the limitations of chemical propulsion, Singer first studied charged particle beams but quickly realized that the spread of the beam as it travels bedevils the concept. A stream of macro-pellets, each several grams in size, would offer a better collimated ‘beam’ that would vaporize to create a hot plasma thrust when it reaches the spacecraft ..read more

You never know when a new interstellar propulsion concept is going to pop up. Some of us have been kicking around fusion runway ideas, motivated by Netflix’s streaming presentation of the Liu Cixin novel The Three Body Problem. There Earth is faced with invasion from an extraterrestrial civilization, but with centuries to solve the problem because it will take that long for the fleet to arrive. Faced with the need to get as much information as possible about the invaders, scientists desperately search for a way to get human technology up to 0.012 percent of lightspeed to intercept the fleet ..read more

Eugene Parker, after whom the Parker Solar Probe was named, seems to have been the first to have accurately predicted the stream of particles emitted by the Sun that forms the ‘solar wind.’ Parker made the call in a 1958 paper, when solar sailing was just being noised about for the first time, so it wouldn’t have struck him that the term was a bit incautious. Today, when solar sailing is operational, people often assume the solar wind drives solar sails, when in fact the operating principle for solar sails is the momentum generated by photons, which are themselves massless. But streaming parti ..read more