100 YSS

Earth is the Cradle of Mankind,
But one cannot stay in the cradle forever.

- Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

The light-years between the stars is a seemingly insurmountable quarantine that cuts our solar system off from the rest of the galaxy. But interstellar distances may not be as insurmountable as they seem.   A large group of international big thinkers descended on Houston, Texas, recently, to discuss one very big idea: making interstellar travel possible within the next 100 years.  And I of course, in my self appointed role as a dedicated space nut, have been following along as best I can, thus my report herein.

We start with the 100 Year Star Ship project (100YSS), seeded by a DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Agency) grant, and a few bucks from NASA as well.  Essentially, the 100 YSS is a project aimed at laying out potential designs for a manned spacecraft and its operating systems, a spacecraft capable of flying between the stars… and hopefully returning to Earth with the crew still alive and kicking.  For now at least, a thought experiment in “designing” a starship is a good bit different from actually attempting to build, and fly, a multi-year long interstellar mission in a totally unproven craft.  Essentially the plan is to examine the spaceflight technology available today… determine what can be used and what can’t… determine what technology we need to develop… and with those determinations in hand, point science and engineering in a useful direction.  Ergo Sum, in a hundred years or so we should have the technical ability to build an honest-to-gawd starship that would make Captain Kirk proud.  Nor is this the first project of its sort.  Space advocates will remember that during the 1970s a team from the British Interplanetary Society carried out the first serious engineering study of an interstellar vehicle, which they named Project Daedalus.  An unmanned probe, Daedalus was designed to fly a 50 year mission to the Centarus system.  Project Icarus is a theoretical design study aimed at designing a credible, mainly nuclear fusion powered unmanned interstellar space probe.  Motivated by Project Daedalus, Icarus began in September 2009, and is a currently ongoing project by an international team of scientists and engineers.  Project Longshot was a conceptual design by NASA and the US Naval Academy for an interstellar unmanned probe powered by a nuclear pulse engine, and intended to enter orbit around Alpha Centauri B.  Running during 1987-88, Longshot also utilized existing or near-term technology. 

None of these programs were actually intended to evolve into flying hardware, being nothing more than “thought experiments”.  I do however have hope for the 100YSS actually being built, at least in part.  It’s considering a long term manned mission, which by it’s very nature will require a large spacecraft with a lot of complex systems.  (I certainly wouldn’t want to spend ten or twenty years cooped up in a sardiene can with a few dozen other people!)  Such a manned craft would require a lot of on-board maintence, and an extensive life support system that could keep the crew supplied with fresh air, pottable water, food, and of course a waste disposal system.  By every indication all of this can be accomplished in space, for a very long time, with todays commonly available technology.  It will however require a lot more volume, a lot of power, and in all likelyhood a lot of labor.  And like everything else we’ve ever built, we won’t be certain of it’s functionality until we’ve actually tried it in space… for a number of years.

Providing the needed electrical power for this craft would be somewhat of a problem, as the currently popular solar arrays aren’t of much use once we get out past Mars, and the nuclear thermal batteries used in today’s deep space probes don’t provide nearly the power we’d need.  However, the solution to that problem is well within our capabilities as well.  In 1960, the US Air Force activated Sundance Air Force Station, about 6 miles from the town of Sundance, Wyoming.  A radar site, Sundance was powered by a PM-1 (Portable Medium Power - 1) transportable nuclear power plant developed by the US Army.  Operated by Air Force, Army, and Navy personnel, the PM-1 produced 1.25 megawatts of electricity without incident until the site was deactivated in 1968.  A second remote, portable reactor, the PM-3A, operated at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica from 1960 until it was deactivated in 1972, producing 1.75 megawatts.  You might also remember that the US Navy has safely been sailing a lot of nuclear powered ships since the 1950’s, and have a number of power reactors running today that can operate as much as fifty years without refueling.

Another well known problem that’s nearly been studied to death is that of deep space cosmic radiation.  Yet that also is nearly a solved problem.  Common polyethylene plastic is light weight and easily worked into whatever size and shape we might want.  It’s also proven to be one of the best radiation shielding materials yet devised, much superior to even the ever so popular lead.  Adding to that, various electromagnetic shielding schemes are under test today, and several are showing considerable promise.  The actual physical construction of such a spacecraft shouldn’t produce any real daunting difficulties either, or at least any more so than building a naval vessel here on earth.  (Probably less, considering all the engineering and construction pre-planning involved.)

So, if we were to build this spacecraft, just what do we do with it, aside from studying and tinkering with it, until its designers wouldn’t recognize it?   Well, we’ve got an entire solar system in our cosmic backyard that we haven’t properly explored yet, and what better way than to send out our big, manned, long term experimental spaceship, on an extended exploratory mission to the outer planets, with a crew of engineers and research scientists aboard.  What a shakedown cruise that would be, and it would prove, one way or another, that the various systems worked properly!

As to actually flying to the stars, we still seem to lack the necessary propulsion system, but even that’s in the works.  First, consider that the speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles, per second!  So if we think of that distance, times sixty seconds, times 60 minutes, times twenty-four hours, times three hundred and sixty five days… we arrive at having to travel quite at a few scadzillion miles to make up one light year.  (The “Light Year” being one yardstick of interstellar distances.)  Now, the Alpha Centauri star system, Earth’s nearest neighbor, lies at about 4.37 light years distant.  At the approximately 1% of the speed of light that we can theoretically reach with today’s propulsion technology, we’re looking at a very long trip!  But… oh that magic but… A “warp drive”, able to achieve faster-than-light travel, may not be as unrealistic as we once though.  Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested a concept for a real-life warp drive in 1994, that takes advantage of a loophole in the laws of realitivity preventing anything from moving faster than light.  With this concept of “warping” space-time itself, a spacecraft should be able to achieve a speed of about 10 times that of light, with the “warping” effect being a sneaky way of sidesteping Albert Einstein’s cosmic speed limit.  This concept was pretty well ignored by scientists at first, due to the prohibitively huge amount of energy required.  (Somewhat along the lines of instantenously turning the equivlent mass of Jupiter into energy…  without blowing a large hole in this end of the Galaxy!)  Now however, physicists have determined that the proposed drive, suitably modified, could run on significantly less energy, taking the idea from the realm of science fiction to the realm of hard science.  The warp drive itself would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large donut shaped ring of “exotic matter” encircling it. The ring, properly activated, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind, effectively allowing the ship to run “downhill”.  (Please don’t ask me about the math involved!)  I don’t know what exotic matter is either, but remember, DARPA has put their money on us taking one hundred years to plan and develop a means of pushing mankind into interstellar space, and to a neighboring star. 

Ex-NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, head of the 100YSS project, stated "For me, the main impetus is: there's more for us. We are at an inflection point in human evolution and human history.  Do we stay in one place? Or do we move like the amphibians that moved to the land way back in our evolutionary past? Do we move beyond this cradle?" 

Traveling to another star may sound like science fiction right now, and the technology needed may seem impossible at the moment, but consider how today’s spaceflight would have appeared to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903.  And yet a mere sixty-three years after men first spread their wings at Kitty Hawk, other men set foot on another cosmic body.  We've already taken the first steps into interplanetary space; so how long until we go interstellar? 

"That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

Niel Armstrong, Apollo 11