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Kelvin Long Talks at the 100 Year Starship Conference in Orlando Florida – Oct 2011
by admin
Kelvin Long, main co-founder of Project Icarus, and co-founder and Vice President (Europe) for Icarus Interstellar Inc., talks at the 100 Year Starship Conference in Orlando Florida. Long is being interviewed by the lovely and beautiful Hailey Bright, who is a producer, actress, TV host, model, and self-professed ‘tech geek’.
Great interview, Kelvin! Don’t forget, where inspiring the public is concerned, the big buzzword is sustainability. People need to be shown how our future on Earth is sustainable enough that we’ll actually get into space on a more permanent basis, and our future in space will be sustainable enough to ensure our long-term interstellar future. Icarus must not be a heroic one-off like Apollo, but the start of a long-term expansion of civilisation on a galactic scale.
Stephen
In fact, talking about one-offs, as you know the situation with robotic exploration at present is that in the 1960s there were robotic exploration programmes such as Mariner and Surveyor in the US and Luna and Venera in the USSR. Now, however, we don’t have robotic exploration programmes any more. Rather we have heroic one-offs, each of which takes more than a decade to build and fly — to which in the case of ExoMars needs to be added another indefinitely prolongable period of forever postponing the launch date while arguing about what the probe will do and how to raise the money for it. Each heroic one-off is made as technologically advanced and as expensive as possible in order to ensure the maximum transfer of funds from the taxpayer to the contractor, the maximum prestige on success and the maximum wastage on failure. It ensures that success cannot be followed up (because there is no follow-up mission in the pipeline), and failure cannot be corrected (consider Beagle 2, Mars 96, Fobos-Grunt — compare with say the Venera or Ranger programmes).
If I was managing Icarus (which you may be glad I am not), I would want to be very clear that I was developing an exploration programme, with a stated level of number of interstellar launches per unit time (say one per 5 or 10 years). In this way a range of target systems is covered, failure of one vehicle feeds in an orderly and systematic way into improvement of the next, and success of one vehicle (which raises more questions than answers) can be followed up at the next opportunity on a sustained and sustainable schedule of exploration.
Stephen