Over this past summer, I was in the pursuit of my Master’s thesis subject. I’ve always been interested in space exploration and settlement, and my graduate advisor, Haym Benaroya, informed me of Project Icarus. This definitely gained my interest, and he subsequently sent me the final report on Project Daedulus. After reading through the Project [...]

With Divya Shankar. From 1987 to 1989, seven First Class Midshipmen at the US Naval Academy embarked upon a study to design an interstellar spacecraft aimed our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. This project represented the United States Naval Academy’s participation in the NASA/USRA University Advanced Design Program. The seven Midshipmen- Keith Beals, Martin Beaulieu, Frank [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One famous science-fictional nod to the hazards of high speed interstellar travel are the navigational deflectors used on the most famous line of SF starships of all, the “Enterprise” starships. All of them feature a glowing forward facing disk which, as made explicit in “The Next Generation” series, is a deflector shield against hazardous impacts [...]

Introduction In the thirty years since the original Daedalus papers were published, mankind has made huge strides in most areas of technology relevant to the project. We have more computing power in our cell phones now than even the biggest super-computers could muster back then; we have discovered new materials with exotic properties; we seem [...]

In 1928 Oberth[1] suggested the option of a two-burn orbital maneuver that would, on the first burn, drop an orbiting spacecraft further down into the central body’s gravity well, then a second burn would be performed to accelerate the spacecraft allowing it to escape the gravity well.  This maneuver was not studied in detail by [...]

The Project Icarus Team plan to follow on from Project Daedalus and design an interstellar spaceship. A few questions might spring to mind, such as, ‘amazing, how you gonna do that’? Or perhaps, ‘Why bother’. Well, that last question certainly deserves an answer and the Project Icarus Team have a subgroup of designers led by [...]

Since 1957 the era of space exploration has taken off with tremendous beginnings, eventually leading to men walking upon the surface of The Moon and astronauts permanently stationed in Earth orbit. With the sophisticated technology of satellite communications and the Space Shuttle it is very easy to forget that the history of early space exploration [...]

In a previous article we took a broad look at the problems involved in interstellar communications. In this article, we will take a closer look at one of the ‘exotic’ techniques mentioned: Gravitational Lensing. Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. This theory considered gravity to be the result of the curvature of [...]