Congress Asks NASA To Consider Interstellar Travel Research
U.S. lawmaker orders NASA to plan for trip to Alpha Centauri by 100th anniversary of moon landing, Science
“Representative John Culberson (R-TX), a self-professed space fan who chairs the House appropriations subpanel that oversees NASA, included the call for the ambitious voyage in a committee report released today. The report accompanies a bill setting NASA’s budget for the 2017 fiscal year, which begins 1 October; the full House appropriations panel is set to consider the bill on Tuesday. In the report, Culberson’s panel “encourages NASA to study and develop propulsion concepts that could enable an interstellar scientific probe with the capability of achieving a cruise velocity of 0.1c [10% of the speed of light].” The report language doesn’t mandate any additional funding, but calls on NASA to draw up a technology assessment report and conceptual road map within 1 year.”
– Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Approriations Bill 2007 (draft report)
– Announcing “Breakthrough Starshot”: Building Earth’s First Starships, earlier post
OK NASA, time to assemble an inspirational/content free Powerpoint stack on how the SLS with an ‘evolved upper stage’ can get us to Alpha Centauri in 200,000 yrs. Now there’s a jobs program worthy of Congressional support.
Somebody is pulling a belated April Fool’s joke, right?! Mars has been 20 years away for humans the last 40 years and now someone wants them to go ‘Interstellar’ with a probe? I think they’ve been watching too many sci-fi films. Think how many hurdles a probe to Pluto had to overcome to happen, and how many hurdles the Europa probe will have to jump over…
Some startling thinking by the congress critters. I wonder where Rep. Culbertson got the interstellar probe idea?
There are lots of other things in that bill of interest to the denizens herein, including talk of the moon as a natural stepping-stone to Mars as well as funding a deep-space hab (my personal favorite).
I suppose he got the idea from that Breakthrough Starshot project Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking announced recently.
Usually Congress gets beaten up – and correctly so – for failing to see anything beyond the next election. Now at least one person in Congress introduces a really long-term project idea into legislation and he gets pounded for being too “blue sky.”
Michael Spencer He got it from reading science fiction stories.
The interstellar part, as worded, looks pretty harmless and, if done right, might even result in a worthwhile overview of possibilities and limitations.
Back in the mid-1980s, Robert Forward did something similar in a series of studies for the USAF. See, for example, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr… and http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search…
Rep Culberson is one of those Texas legislators that comes up with some nonsense project and manages to get a lot of attention for it. He is sort of like Charlie Wilson who singlehandedly directed resources to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. And who’s unintended result was to help the Taliban get started.
Rep Culberson’s constituents embarrass the rest of us by not knowing that he is wasting a lot of time and money in Washington.
Well, I’m (happy to be) one of Culberson’s constituents – sorry that you feel I embarrass “the rest of us” (whomever that is).
Much cheaper high power, high optical quality continuous wave lasers could have many worthwhile applications even before interstellar missions are launched. For example: aircraft powered by lasers from space. The lasers needed for the recent proposal would have to cost around $0.10/W, a factor of 100 below current costs. A large jet engine produces ~70MW.