Centauri Dreams: Imagining And Planning Interstellar Exploration

by Paul Gilster

An audacious and some would say quixotic plan to send an unmanned craft to Centauri the star system nearest to our Sun is already underway at a number of NASA sites around the U S Why today would anyone undertake to think and plan seriously for such a hypothetical spacecraft Can scientists and engineers seriously contemplate such a vehicle when its existence is at least 30 years in the future and its first one way journey would take at least 40 years to complete Gilster investigates the science and just as importantly the spirit of the researchers who are actually at work on just such a project Paul Gilster a syndicated newspaper columnist on technology computers and business is the author of six previous books most notably The Internet Navigator and Digital Literacy I wrote this book because I wanted to learn more about interstel lar flight Not the Star Trek notion of tearing around the Galaxy in a huge spaceship that was obviously beyond existing tech nology but a more realistic mission In 1989 I had videotaped Voyager 2 s encounter with Neptune and watched the drama of robotic exploration over and over again I started to wonder whether we could do something similar with Alpha Centauri the nearest star to the Sun Everyone seemed to agree that manned flight to the stars was out of the question if not permanently then for the indefinitely foreseeable future But surely we could do something with robotics And if we could figure out a theoretical way to do it how far were we from the actual technology that would make it happen In other words what was the state of our interstellar technology today those concepts and systems that might translate into a Voyager to the stars Finding answers meant talking to people inside and outside of NASA I was surprised to learn that there is a large literature of interstellar flight Nobody knows for sure how to propel a space craft fast enough to make the interstellar crossing within a time scale t

Paperback