Deep Space Propulsion A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight
As humans take their first tentative steps off our home planet, and debate the costs/benefits of sending people back to the Moon and perhaps on to Mars, we must also start to make plans for the day when we will venture forth as pioneers farther out into t
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K.F. Long
Deep Space Propulsion A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight
K.F. Long Bsc, Msc, CPhys Vice President (Europe), Icarus Interstellar Fellow British Interplanetary Society Berkshire, UK
ISBN 978-1-4614-0606-8 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-0607-5 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0607-5 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011937235 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
This book is dedicated to three people who have had the biggest influence on my life. My wife Gemma Long for your continued love and companionship; my mentor Jonathan Brooks for your guidance and wisdom; my hero Sir Arthur C. Clarke for your inspirational vision – for Rama, 2001, and the books you leave behind.
Foreword
We live in a time of troubles. It is easy to name a few of them: endless wars, clashes of cultures, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, global climate warming, economic recession, political disarray. It is also easy to give up and conclude that all is hopeless for our civilization and possibly for all humanity. However, is such pessimism truly warranted? The year 2010 witnessed the first reasonably solid detection of potentially habitable worlds circling nearby stars. Our understanding of the variety of life forms that could inhabit these worlds has also been broadened. Perhaps more significantly, another milestone of 2010 was the first successful flight test of a non-rocket propulsion system that could someday evolve into a star drive. True – the solar sails that may evolve from the successful interplanetary test flight of the Japanese Ikaros probe will never achieve the performance of Star Trek’s mythical Enterprise – but they represent a start. Progress towards controlled thermonuclear fusion continues. And at the CERN laboratory on the Italian-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider is now operational. It is not impossible that advances in our understanding of particle physics prompted by experiments at this new facility will ultimately lead to our taming of the antimatter/matter annihilation. Maybe some theoretical breakthrough will actually lead to a warp drive or a means of tapping the enormous energies of the universal vacuum. It is impossible to know which of these new t
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