Physicist Dr. John Hunter has been announced as a speaker for Icarus Interstellar’s 2013 Starship Congress, with the following talk:  Jules Verne 2.0 — The Hydrogen Gas Gun: Part of the Interstellar Roadmap. Dr. Hunter obtained a Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics at The College of William and Mary in 1984.  He was the SHARP [...]

Architects Giorgio Gaviraghi and André Caminoa have been announced as speakers for Icarus Interstellar’s 2013 Starship Congress, with the following three talks:  Critical Path and Interstellar Routes, Code of Ethics for Alien Encounters, and A Kardashev III Approach to Extra-Solar Planetary System Colonization.  Giorgio Gaviraghi received his Architectural degree in 1968 at the Milan Polytechnic [...]

Nuclear engineer Dr. Pavel Tsvetkov has been announced as a keynote speaker for Icarus Interstellar’s 2013 Starship Congress. His talk will focus on the fission-fragment rocket, a rocket engine design that directly harnesses hot nuclear fission products for thrust, rather than using a separate fluid as working mass. More details and an abstract for the session will be posted soon to this [...]

A personal perspective by Rob Swinney, Project Leader Project Icarus, Icarus Interstellar   Earlier this month Richard Osborne and I attended the ‘Future Cities 2: Other Worlds’ conference at the University of Greenwich in the School of Architecture, Design and Construction.  It’s quite hard to put in words how far out of my normal experience [...]

What is Project Longshot II – The Next Generation (TNG)? Project LONGSHOT-II, The Next Generation is a students’ project of ICARUS INTERSTELLAR which is aiming to revisit, update and redesign the original Project LONGSHOT. Project Longshot was an US Naval Academy’s NASA/USRA University advanced design program project report for 1987-88 carried out by seven first [...]

Abstract The Daedalus starship propulsion concept is electron-beam-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Here I show that, without beam self-fields, the beam will form a large electron cloud and wonʼt set off the pellet. Even with optimal background plasma conditions, generating just the right self-fields, the beam suffers beamfront erosion, both inductive erosion and magnetic. They [...]

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity tells us that the speed of light, c, is nature’s speed limit. All particles of pure energy are locked at this speed, and all matter particles always move more slowly than c. Thus, running a fair race[1] with a light beam is not only a fool’s errand, but it would [...]

I really enjoyed the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium. The majority of the time at the symposium I attended presentations in the Time and Distance Solutions track. I found these talks very exciting, enjoyable, and informative. My own presentation in this track was on the physics behind a possible design for a matter/antimatter (MAM) propulsion [...]