DARPA: U.S. military to help launch intersteller space travel

Forget about Europe and Russia working together to send people to Mars, one U.S. government agency wants to get the ball rolling on interstellar space travel.

Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is looking to award a $500,000 grant to an ambitious organisation to figure out just what it would take to transport humans to stars orbiting beyond our galaxy, according to a recent report.

The grant, scheduled to be released on November 11th, is the result of the 100-Year Starship Study, the agency’s year-long collaboration with NASA wherein collaborators explored various approaches to developing a “viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines” required to “make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible,” according to the website.

A three-day public symposium will be held on Sept. 30 in Orlando, Florida, to discuss ways to persuade more people and institutions to start asking “Why not?", "Dare we?" and "How can we?”

If the idea sounds far out, in a technical sense, it is. Voyager 1, the fastest spacecraft mankind has ever built, has a gravity-assisted top speed of 38,000 miles and, even at that rate, would take more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest neighbouring star system.

Clearly, a number of prominent scientists would like to be known that ideas to cut travel time to such a destination from thousands of years to a much more manageable 50 years is very much plausible. Some of these include:

• Propelling a ship using the pressure waves created by a series of atomic bomb explosions located on the back end. Originally conceived in the late 1950s by a group of prominent scientists that incuded Freeman Dyson, the method would speed up the journey, though it would still take hundreds of years to reach Alpha Centauri.

• Using tiny thermonuclear explosions to generate thrust, a more modest method that requires the use of laser blasts to compress pellets of deuterium and helium-3 - The brains behind this proposal are a group called the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), which presented the plan in the 1970s as part of their own interstellar spaceship study, Project Daedalus. They conjecture that it would create enough propulsion for a 500-ton scientific probe to reach Barnard’s Star, 5.9 light-years away, in about 50 years time. Along the way, the spacecraft would hit speeds as fast as 12 percent of the speed of light.

There is, as always a big but in the way! Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s keep in mind that for now the plausibility of journeying to other galaxies is still the stuff of science fiction.

Warp speed technologies that can easily help travelers get around time based human aging and other astro physics problems, are not yet available.

A real-life spaceship capable of interstellar space travel may take centuries to build and can easily cost trillions of dollars to develop. The trip would also most likely be a one-way ticket.

David Neyland, Darpa’s director of tactical technology, also won’t hesitate to point out that the grant is merely intended to serve as financial assistance for the development of a business plan, not a spaceship, that may enable mankind to travel to the stars.

“We don’t intend to carry it forward,” Mr. Neyland said. “Darpa hands the keys over to this entity, and we wish them well.”