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The same laser system being developed to blast tiny spacecraft between the stars could also launch human missions to Mars, protect Earth from dangerous asteroids and help get rid of space junk, project leaders say.

Last month, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and other researchers announced Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million project that aims to build prototype light-propelled “wafersats” that could reach the nearby Alpha Centauri star system just 20 years after launch.

The basic idea behind Breakthrough Starshot has been developed primarily by astrophysicist Philip Lubin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has twice received funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to develop the laser propulsion system. [Stephen Hawking Video: ‘Transcending Our Limits’ with Breakthrough Starshot].

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Fifty-five years ago, Yuri Gagarin rocketed into orbit and began to break our bonds to our planet. To mark the occasion, the nonprofit Breakthrough Institute just announced plans to free us from an even more formidable set of bonds and send a fleet of small spacecraft beyond our solar system, off to the stars. News of the ‘Breakthrough Starshot’ plan was met with great enthusiasm, but also with more than a little skepticism. The distance between stars is vast. Our closest neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, is 4.4 light years away – roughly 25 trillion miles. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, the fastest object ever created by humans, would take 70,000 years to travel that far. Many reporters greeted the Breakthrough Starshot as an idea grounded more in fantasy than in reality.

The reaction was understandable. All previous plans for interstellar flight relied on non-existent or impractical technologies such as antimatter, wormholes and warp drives. But now we have a concrete path forward, which I have published in detail. It is possible to begin the journey to the stars today.

Drawing on recent advances in photonics and electronics, we could use arrays of lasers to accelerate miniature probes (the size and mass of a semiconductor wafer, weighing less than one ounce) to unprecedented velocities. Particles of light, or photons, have no rest mass but they carry energy and momentum. Just as a sailboat can be propelled by the wind, light sails can ride the momentum of photons by reflecting a wind of intense laser light. We call such focused beams of light ‘directed energy’.

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Friends have been asking me to write something on space exploration and my campaign policy on it, so here it is just out on TechCrunch:

When people think about rocket ships and space exploration, they often imagine traveling across the Milky Way, landing on mysterious planets and even meeting alien life forms.

In reality, humans’ drive to get off Planet Earth has led to tremendous technological advances in our mundane daily lives — ones we use right here at home on terra firma.

I recently walked through Boston’s Logan International Airport; a NASA display reminded me that GPS navigation, anti-icing systems, memory foam and LED lights were all originally created for space travel. Other inventions NASA science has created include the pacemaker, scratch-resistant lenses and the solar panel.

Continue reading “Space exploration will spur transhumanism and mitigate existential risk” | >

Coming clean on the story around the XS-1 Spaceplane. Hmmm; US Government coming clean; really?

ORLANDO, Fla. – Here’s a phrase that’s not repeated everyday in the space community:

“You’ve heard Elon’s comments … we want to go beyond that,” Brad Tousley, the head of the tactical technology office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said May 15.

Elon, of course, is Elon Musk, the optimistic, and some say visionary, founder of SpaceX with plans of eventually colonizing Mars. After landing three first-stage rockets, Musk has said SpaceX would inspect the rockets with plans to later re-fly most of them. [DARPA’s XS-1 Military Space Plane Concept in Pictures].

Continue reading “Why DARPA Is Pursuing the Reusable Military XS-1 Spaceplane” | >