A Fusion Starship Study

I apologize in advance from writing this blog from a very personal point of view, but if you ever experienced Africa, you know it cannot be described in purely objective terms, though I will try my best.

View of Cape Town downtown from the top of Table Mountain.

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Tiffany Frierson is a Project Icarus student designer. She is a senior physics major currently at North Georgia College. She plans to go on to a PhD in Theoretical Physics, and study Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, especially the more exotic methods including wormholes and warp drives. With a life-long interest in space travel, her activities have included a speech at Boston University’s 50-Year Space Vision conference in 2007, whose attendants included Freeman Dyson, John Mather and Russell Schweickart. Tiffany programs in C++, C#, Java and Python. She currently resides in Georgia, USA.

Last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I had the incredible privilege of attending the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium. I would not have even had the opportunity to attend if it had not been for the Icarus Interstellar organization. This symposium served not only as a huge learning and networking opportunity, but also as a chance to meet most of the other members of the Icarus team. First, I want to thank Robert Swinney and Sue Morris profusely for hosting me at their house for the 4 days that I was there. I owe you two so much. You two were amazingly good to me, and helped me so much by waking me up on time (I am severely hearing impaired) and even letting me eat breakfast there for free.My trip actually started on Thursday morning, when I flew into Orlando. After I landed, I was immediately taken on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the Kennedy Space Center by Rob and Sue, who picked me up from the airport. We were able to see actual space shuttles in person (Endeavour and Discovery) and check out the workplace of actual NASA employees. Not only that, but we were able to check out a launching pad up close and also watch an interactive movie of one of the flights to the moon. [Read more →]

A World Ship is a very large vehicle many tens of kilometres in length and having a mass of millions of tons, moving at a fraction of a per cent of the speed of light and taking hundreds of years to millennia to complete its journey. It is a self-contained, self-sufficient ship carrying a crew that may number hundreds to thousands and may even contain an ocean, all directed towards an interstellar colonisation strategy.

Artists depiction of Martin/Bond (1984) Worldship Concept.

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Dust in our solar system experiences a surprising lifecycle. For very small particles, solar pressure and electrostatic forces can compete with gravity to create highly non-traditional orbits. Some dust finds a stable orbit in which to live out its existence; some dust calmly lands on the surface of planets like our own, and some dust is energetically ejected from our solar system altogether, embarking on interstellar trajectories.
Dust particles vary from a few molecules to 100 µm in size and have a mass smaller than a few micrograms. At these mass scales, the acceleration due to what would be considered perturbation forces on larger bodies can no longer be neglected. In fact, they can potentially be harnessed and controlled in order to enable new technologies and missions. [Read more →]

‘Robot probes – flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit … Barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever …’

Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth, 1986

As Project Icarus enters its next stage we will, slowly but surely, move towards a precise quantitative design for our hypothetical interstellar probe.

But some interstellar craft in science fiction have featured remarkably detailed and plausible designs – not surprisingly, as many of them derived from work by, or were even written by, experts in the field. What can we learn from these fictional precedents? [Read more →]

Tiffany Frierson is a Project Icarus Student Designer

Tiffany Frierson is a Project Icarus student designer. She is a senior physics major currently at North Georgia College. She plans to go on to a PhD in Theoretical Physics, and study Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, especially the more exotic methods including wormholes and warp drives. With a life-long interest in space travel, her activities have included a speech at Boston University’s 50-Year Space Vision conference in 2007, whose attendants included Freeman Dyson, John Mather and Russell Schweickart. Tiffany programs in C++, C#, Java and Python. She currently resides in Georgia, USA.

By far, the best propulsion prospect for near-term interstellar travel is nuclear fusion. The propulsion team of Project Icarus, with its emphasis on near-term solutions for interstellar travel, will focus on nuclear fusion for its study. However, antimatter propulsion has the best mass-energy conversion ratio of any of the methods of propulsion currently under study. Therefore, it remains an important area of research in the propulsion field. Much excellent progress has been made in this area. [Read more →]

Alan Hale writes as a new member to Project Icarus. Alan’s research interests include the search for planets beyond the solar system, including those which might have favorable environments for life; stars like the sun; minor bodies in the solar system, especially comets and near-Earth asteroids; and advocacy of spaceflight. He is primarily known for his work with comets, which has included his discovery of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1995 and his participation in the International HalleyWatch during the return of Halley’s Comet in 1986.

This article originally appeared in the Alamogordo (New Mexico) Daily News as part of the weekly column ‘In Our Skies.’ It has been modified slightly from its original version.

As recently as two decades ago, when this author was in graduate school and researching this particular topic, the subject of planets outside our solar system was almost completely theoretical. There were quite a few ideas floating around as to what these worlds might be like, and where they might be found, but at that time there were no such worlds that had been discovered and confirmed, and thus the subject remained in the realm of speculation. [Read more →]

Yesterday my wife and I took our twin boys (age 5) to see the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-133. This is the last mission of Space Shuttle Discovery, and the remaining two Shuttles only have one mission each before they too are retired. Despite having lived here in Tampa for over a decade, my wife and I had never attended a launch — and STS-133 offered a convenient launch window at 4:50pm — so we figured it was high time. [Read more →]

As part of the Project Icarus Terms of Reference, essentially our engineering requirements, the team is required to demonstrate some form of deceleration for the Icarus probe. The exact text stipulates “The spacecraft mission must be designed so as to allow some deceleration for increased encounter time at the destination”; note the phrase ‘some deceleration’. The exact amount was not specified but a 1% deceleration from the cruise velocity would probably be considered inadequate to meet the requirements. Possibly, a 10-20% deceleration  would meet the requirements but this is a matter for team discussion and for the judgment of others who may view the design post-project. Ideally, the probe would be decelerated by more like 70-90% of the peak cruise velocity, but this is a real challenge to achieve. Currently, several areas of investigation for deceleration have been identified and these include: Reverse engine thrust, solar sail, Magsail, Medusa sail, microwave sail, orbital slingshot, aerobraking. These are briefly discussed. [Read more →]

Introduction

In fiction, a number of imaginary emissaries have sailed before Icarus into the dark interstellar ocean. There have been fewer tales featuring unmanned probes than manned starships like the Enterprise of Star Trek, purely because of the wider dramatic possibilities of the latter. But the depiction of interstellar probes in science fiction may serve to highlight cultural aspects associated with such craft, our hopes and dreams and fears, of interest to the Icarus designers. [Read more →]

Divya Shankar

Divya Shankar is a student designer involved with Project Icarus. Divya is doing a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology, Bangalore, India. And will be graduating in June 2012. She is a self-admitted space buff and loves space technology. She has recently been working in a project called STUDSAT (www.teamstudsat.com ), which is a Student satellite project in collaboration with ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) and has been working on this since her 1st year of her engineering degree. Divya writes about her experience on STUDSAT. [Read more →]

The idea of rocket propulsion is somewhat familiar to most people, in the sense that it is understood that gases are ejected at high pressure from the rear of a spacecraft, and that this ejection generates thrust. Rocket propulsion is ideal for launching spacecraft from the Earth, because the amount of force generated by the fuel is huge. However, one of the drawbacks of conventional rockets is their low exhaust velocity; that is, only a relatively small amount of net energy can be liberated from the fuel, when compared with, say, nuclear fuel. This drawback means that to accelerate an object to very high speeds, say a reasonable fraction of the speed of light, that a huge amount of fuel would be required. In fact, some fairly simple calculations using the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation demonstrate that to accelerate a spacecraft to about 10% the speed of light would require more propellant than is available in the known universe! Clearly  chemical rocket fuels are inadequate for the task of interstellar propulsion if travel times are to be on the order of a human lifespan. [Read more →]

In this article, we aim to open up discussions on hardware electronics and computers for the Icarus and interstellar space missions in general.

Introduction

In today’s society, everybody is witness to the enormous advances in computer technology from ENIAC’s day until today. Home computers routinely implement features which a few decades ago were found only in mainframe systems. Virtualization, multi-core processing and even the existence of personal computers are but a few examples. [Read more →]

Introduction – Software maintenance

Following on from the recent blogs by Philipp Reiss and Robert Freeland II, I thought I would add a little of my own perspective and experience, as a deep space software engineer.

Let’s remember: the only item of a spacecraft that is routinely subject to maintenance after launch is the on-board software. This can also be used to work around other system problems. For example, when the Voyager scan platform suffered a failure the on-board software was reprogrammed to roll the whole spacecraft, to achieve an equivalent scan of the camera pointing direction. Similarly following the failure of the upper stage of Hipparcos the onboard software was substantially reconfigured, firstly for fault investigation, and recovery attempts, and then subsequently for a revised mission approach. In the end this sucessfully recovered the mission from a completely different orbit. Furthermore many spacecraft have been characterised so completely when in space that progressive refinements of the software have provided ever greater operating capabilities.  This approach to software updates has now become so sophisticated that some spacecraft are launched without anything other than their basic safety and cruise phase software loaded. This allows subsequent development and refinement of the mission software post launch. [Read more →]

In Part 1 we looked at the cost of building and launching a “Daedalus” class star-probe, massing some 2,000 tonnes with empty tanks. The original “Project Daedalus” study fuelled the vehicle with a 50,000 tonne mixture of deuterium (worth $25,000/kg) and helium-3 (currently available only in tiny amounts on Planet Earth.) To solve the fuelling problem, the Design Team of “Daedalus” examined the different sources of helium-3, the lightest helium isotope, composed of just 2 protons and one neutron. What makes it rare is what makes it desirable as a star-probe fuel – it can be fused relatively easily. Not as easily as deuterium fusing with itself, or deuterium with tritium, but helium-3’s reaction with deuterium doesn’t make damaging high-energy neutrons like the former two reactions. So helium-3, like deuterium, is rare in the Universe because it fuses too easily relative to plain hydrogen and plain helium-4. [Read more →]

SpaceX have successfully orbited and re-entered their first fully operational Dragon Capsule, making it the first private re-entry…

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

…good news for space access, one hopes. If Elon Musk & SpaceX can make good on their plans for a reusable 1st Stage, then the outlook for their Cheap Access To Space (CATS) ambitions is looking good. Falcon 9 can orbit up to 10,450 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), while the Falcon 9 Heavy – a Falcon 9 with two extra First Stages as side-mounted boosters – could potentially orbit 32 tonnes in one launch. That’s the upper end of the current launch market, but bigger plans have been mooted. [Read more →]

The nominal Daedalus mission profile would accelerate the probe for around 3.8 years with an exhaustive pulse frequency of 250 detonations per second. Assuming no major failure modes occurred during this time the vehicle would then attain its cruise velocity of 0.12c and coast to its target for another 46 years. It would whip through its target system Barnard’s star, 5.9 light years away, in a matter of days. Considering the likely cost of such a mission, perhaps in the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, and the energy expenditure required to accomplish it – is flyby worth the effort? [Read more →]

The 2010 Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop (ASPW) was held at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs (UCCS) from Monday, November 15 through Wednesday, November 17. The conference was sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL, based in Edwards, CA), the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, based in Pasadena, CA), and the NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC, based in Cleveland, OH.

This was the 18th edition of the workshop, the first having been convened in 1990. Owing mainly to NASA budget cuts, the conference ceased being “annual” after the 16th edition in April 2005 in Huntsville, AL. The most recent 17th edition of the workshop was convened in October 2008 in Pasadena, CA.

This workshop focuses primarily on early-stage propulsion research, ideally in the “Technology Readiness Level” (TRL) 1-2 range. NASA’s increased 2011 funding for basic research has sparked renewed interest in early-stage space propulsion research, so the conference was well-attended with 75 registered participants and over 50 presentations in just three days. Sessions ran from 8:00am until 6:00pm Monday and Tuesday, with an “early” finish on Wednesday at around 4:00pm. Due to time constraints, talks were limited to just 20 minutes, including questions. Group dinners on Monday and Tuesday nights were scheduled just after the completion of the day’s presentations, so it all made for a rather grueling pace. [Read more →]

Feasible, practical and relatively cheap nuclear fusion concept is one of science’s holy grails and the search has been on for more than five decades now. It represents one of the ultimate sources of energy for both terrestrial and space practices. There are dozens of research projects, involving more than twenty different approaches for nuclear fusion, but no fusion with gain has been achieved yet. I will hereby try to go through some of the main fusion ideas and introduce you to a fusion concept named Plasma-Jet driven Magneto-Inertial Fusion (PJMIF). [Read more →]