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Subscribe to RSSFrom April 15, 2010: Former astronaut Mae Jemison tells MSNBC she believes President Barack Obama's plans for NASA will help the agency move forward. Jemison is to lead the "100 Year Starship" effort.
The Pentagon's think tank has selected the group that will manage its "100 Year Starship" project to explore what it would take for a multigenerational mission beyond the solar system, and sources say the leader will be Mae Jemison, who became the first black woman in space in 1992.
In the 20 years since then, Jemison has founded several ventures — including The Jemison Group, a technology design and consulting company; and the Houston-based Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which takes on educational projects. Jemison, a 55-year-old Alabama native who has experience as a physician and a Peace Corps worker as well as an astronaut, played a prominent role in facilitating the 100 Year Starship symposium organized by NASA and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Florida last fall.
One of the follow-ups from that seminar was to be the award of a $500,000 contract from DARPA to continue study of the technological, political and social requirements for ultra-long-term projects such as interstellar space missions. Several ventures put in proposals, and one of the groups that didn't win the contract, the Tau Zero Foundation, said in this week's email update that the contract was going to a team "led by an ex-astronaut."
The BBC identified the ex-astronaut as Jemison, based on the text of an unreleased letter from DARPA. It also reported that Jemison's foundation was teaming up with two other groups, Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.
NASA file
Jemison was the first black woman in space in 1992.
DARPA has not yet publicly announced the selection, and my efforts to contact the agency's representatives have been unsuccessful so far. But after the BBC's story, the report was confirmed on the Centauri Dreams blog by Paul Gilster, who is affiliated with the Tau Zero Foundation. Gilster said Jemison's organization "now takes on the challenge of building a program that can last 100 years, and might one day result in a starship."
Adam Crowl, director of Icarus Interstellar, elaborated in a blog comment:
"... Project Icarus will keep running as it has since 2009, and the end point will be an interstellar probe design, chiefly fusion-propelled in the boost phase. That’s due at some point in 2014.
"Icarus Interstellar is a broader banner for a whole group of interstellar related research projects, Project Icarus being just one, which will be producing designs and doing basic research with the common goal of building the technical foundation required for eventual successful interstellar flight.
"Now in light of this news, we’ll be under the banner of the 100 Year Starship Organization, which covers more than just the technical aspects. Each of the triad came to our happy union with different strengths and emphases – Mae Jemison’s organization covering education and broader social goals, the Foundation for Enterprise Development covering innovative organization and operational approaches, and Icarus Interstellar covering the technical aspects. Together we’ll be working towards an organization that will last 100 years and produce a viable interstellar technology, with benefits for all humankind."
The $500,000 DARPA grant is intended to serve as seed money for the 100 Year Starship Organization. Meanwhile, the founder of Tau Zero, former NASA researcher Marc Millis, suggested in his email update that Tau Zero would lower its profile:
"It is too soon to know how this selection will affect Tau Zero's goal to rigorously and impartially guide progress toward interstellar flight. With insufficient funding to go around, I feel that it would be a disservice to the community for Tau Zero to attempt to compete with this new organization, especially considering that this new organization now has significantly more than an order of magnitude more funding. I hope they serve the community well."
Millis said Centauri Dreams would "continue to operate as an impartial and articulate news source and discussion forum on all things interstellar."
Courtesy of Adrian Mann
An artist's impression shows the Icarus starship accelerating past Jupiter, gaining a valuable boost in speed with the help of the gas giant's gravity, slingshotting it toward its interstellar destination.
Jemison has made a name for herself not only as the first black woman in space, but also as the first real-life astronaut to appear on a "Star Trek" episode. How big of a role will she and her partners play in turning the "Star Trek" vision into reality, and on what time scale? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
Update for 9 p.m. ET Jan. 9: DARPA confirmed the selection of Jemison's foundation in a brief statement attributed to Paul Eremenko, DARPA program manager, but indicated that the deal was not yet completely done:
"We can confirm that the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence has been selected for negotiation for a grant award for the 100 Year Starship effort. We have no further comment until the grant is awarded."
More about interstellar flight:
- Reality check for starships
- Billionaires wanted for starship plan
- Visionaries ponder 100-year starship
- Sex poses big challenge for interstellar travel
- Destination for first starship? Someplace that's livable
- The best options for flying to faraway stars
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
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leftist tards... the trilllions sucked from taxpayers and flushed down the toilet of public education can never be recouped. the latset scam has been 4k... this is actually day care .... very expensive day care at that. what do we get with this.... reading scores go down... big surprise....
What the hell are you babbling on about?
Humanity is the Trailer Trash of the Galaxy. We can't handle the problems we have here on Earth, we have no business screwing up the Cosmos. This is a complete waste of money and time.
I just love the way people make unqualified statements. I guess Trooper Tom has been all around our galactic neighbourhood, so he must know where we stand.
Man-o-man! I sure would love to move to one of the upscale parts of the galixie. I reckon for now I'll have to be satisfied with being trash, or letting Tom tell me about it.
How much is this project going to cost? While larger and larger numbers of people right here at home go on suffering, because the president obsesses with meeting Marvin the Martian?
one can only hope that all of the people involved in this project will READ the posts here from the world's foremost pinheads.
That alone should be more than enough inspiration to get off this planet.
to boldly go where no one has gone before......and leave the pinheads on earth to "duke" it out.
when the chinese can make a quality nut and bolt then MAYBE then can get off the launchpad without blowing up
I've been waiting on a Star Ship as long as I remember, which is at least 60 years. I won't live to see it, but it will be a thrill of a lifetime for the young people of that generation who gets to actually go. I remember the Movie Forbidden Planet, which is a little before Star Trek. Been hooked on that hope every sense. Let's go for it!
well, who's gonna be the red shirts ????
What a colossal waste of money, time & manpower on all levels! What is it we are trying to gain from this kind of mission? Is it worth the bazillions of dollars it would cost to put together & operate? If we are willing to earmark this kind of money to probe deep space in this fashion, maybe we should reconsider and use the same amount of money to get our country, our world back in shape & unity....Can you imagine if we spent the money to create a star ship out there light years away that we had to support with food, etc. through some kind of staging system only to have the funds cut at some point (nothing is forever), leaving the star ship to fend for itself? A crazy, irresponsible, poorly thought out idea from the start.
Of course, you are so right, Jim. It would cost hundreds of yen to call up the alien races who live nearby the route the ship would take, and have them deliver pizza to the ship. Staging system? Ask Chris Columbus about the reststops in the Atlantic Ocean, or Sir Edmund Hillary about the golden arches he found on Everest.
The same amount of money, $500,000 would do so much to get our country out of debt.
$500,000 would do so much to get our country ouf of debt? I dont think so, but it could feed some hungry children. But what happens when we deplete our planet? Then we all die, so a little push to get off this rock wouldnt be a bad investment. I'd sooner see private enterprise take it instead of the government though.
Columbus did the deed in the name of the King. How would things turn out if private enterprise started claiming the stars on behalf of humanity, instead of whatever flag they are flying?
Looking at her background and experience, she is about as qualified
to accomplish that job as Obummer is to be president. Neither of them could successfully
launch a bottle rocket. Obummer is wasting more money throwing it at unqualified
people without the technology to accomplish the end game. More Liberal fluff and good intentions
without results mark my word!
The government, especially the way things are going down the drain, will not be the ones to make this a reality. It will be funded and run entirely by private/corporate interests, ala Virgin Galactic and the like. Frankly, this is the way it should be as our government has a spending problem as it is.
So the next question becomes... how exactly will Earth bound governments regulate space travel, mining, etc...
100 year project. The moon, the Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn projects all come within the purview of those charged with learning how to travel across interstellar space to another inhabitable planet. All the scientific arguments against the project are pathetic. One area to be investigated is people living together in a sealed or isolated community. I'll go do it just to see those reactionaries pass away from lack of ire.
Five hundred thousand dollars seed money. That money would not buy a new presidential armour plated limosine, let alone a congressional junket to the mid-east. I hear squawking about spending half a buck when sports stars earn more for drinking an energy drink on camera.
And Ms Jemmison is a doctor and a scientist and a retired astronaut. Personally I think she's cute but she seems as right as anyone else for the job. Go to a political thread if you want to talk politics. This is academic and exploration related, not Karl Marx or Adolf Hitler.
I have an idea. You politicals stay here and fight. We'll go see if there's anything else for you to fight over, and get back to you, as soon as your economists buy us the gas for the return trip.
In the meantime, I hope some of those private funding sources can see beyond the national flags. Let's build the Daedalus. I'll volunteer to go to the moon and start work on the propellant tanks right now.
There is only one true Skipper...Alan Hale
Sending humans on a multigeneration interstellar voyage is a pipe dream for now. We'll have to find more habitable planets and have automatic probes explore them first. Money should be spent into such projects first. No need to transport food, air, water and all kind of accomodations for humans. At any rate, I don't expect any of this to happen in the next five hundred years. And by the time it does happen, we'll have found ways to get there much faster.
If this were a one way trip, we'd also have to carry animal embryos and our kind of vegetation. There is no certainty that we could eat the local food if any once we've arrived. I think most people don't understand how extraordinarily difficult it will be. In short we need to find a better and faster way to do it.
First of all, it's unethical to commit generations of your own progreny to a lifetime in a tin can just because you have a cosmic suicide mission on the brain.
More importantly, and I hate to break it to you but, Star Trek is fake. So was Battlestar Galactica and SG-1. When you grow up, you won't look like a pimply-faced geek anymore but you still will be.
In the meantime, physics, probability and common sense are all screaming at you to get a life!
Spend the public's money on something other than a pipe dream...like Terra-forming Mars!!!
Star Trek and science-fiction in general are at their best when they convey ideas of things that are even remotely possible. Some of our technology has already outpaced Star Trek and even a Matter Transporter appears possible at least in quantum mechanics. Don't underestimate the power of science fiction; beyond the many absurdities, there are the gem ideas that will become part of our future. People have to dream and make plans for the future. Our own existence is what gives space and time it's relevance. No matter how insignificant we are, we are an important part of everything. We just need time to go to Mars and beyond. For now, our multigeneration ship is right here and it's called the Earth.
Our nearest stellar neighbor besides our own Sun is Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri tri-star system. Using Ion drive propulsion, which has only recently been developed, it would only take 81,000 years to get there. With gravitational assist, that could drop to only 19,000 years, and with theoretical nuclear pulse propulsion we could get there in just 85 years. So to succeed we would need to be in suspended animation (cryo or some other yet to be discovered technique) for the trip, or have kids along the way. I won't even bother to look up how long it would take to get to the nearest star that has a planet which may be a candidate for supporting life as we know it. I'll have some of whatever these people are smoking, or better yet, quit pissing away money trying to have manned space exploration. Let's send a probe. "Make it so"."
If anyone out there has read Arthur C. Clarke's book, RAMADAN, you would have a pretty decent idea of what the challenges are... interstellar and mutli-generational travel will eventually lead to incest thanks to the limited pool. Just saying...
I actually support the cause... space travel, not incest.
Send in the clones. LOL
What? I thought Uhura was the first black woman astronaut! Oh, that's right, she won't be born for two hundred years...
Funny! Good one! ;)
I hope some day we will be able to turn the dream of interstellar travel into reality, preferably in our lifetime. I think the best option for flying to faraway stars will be fusion-powered starship fueled with helium-3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqnk19hn7Rc
Hey guys. I've had an idea for a while, and this may be a good opportunity to share it and get feed back.
Here goes. We know that massive, rotating objects gives rise to a phenomenon usually known as frame-dragging.
What if one was to place two very, VERY massive objects close together, have the objects counter-rotate and be able to keep them apart (tall order).
What would be the effect of the dragging at the mid point between the objects?
What would the effect be if they rotated the same direction?
Would it drag space/time between them, causing the objects to move in the opposite direction?
Perhaps in the far future that could be used to drive a star ship???????????
There you have it. What are your thoughts?
What you just described sounds very much like what they are working on, (folding space) or in more familiar terms, "Warp Drive". You bend the space in front of you and behind you at the same time. While standing still basically your movement results from the warping of space placing you in a "Warp" field of sorts in the middle. The more you bend it the further and faster you go.
To your question, I have been saying for years, unless we create the Engine or method of movement for this its putting the cart before the horse literally! If we are serious about making up lost time simply becuse of a lack of vision we have to put our money where our mouths are. This subject would excite a new generation of scientist. Im glad for this discussion.
When they get past the final planet they can hear Paul Revere "ringing those bells" and warning those british they are not gonna take away our guns!
Are they Serious???? They're calling this project "Icarus" ???
Well done, geniuses at NASA. I figured someone in that organization would be educated enough to NOT use that name.
You'd be better off calling the project, "Titanic II - Spaceshuttle Challenger Tries Again" - - -
For those unfamiliar, the story of Icarus from Greek Mythology is about a young man achieving flight, but being killed in the attempt. (Check wikipedia dot com or just do a google search for "Icarus, flight"
Its about time!!! We are already behind schedule simply because of admited blindness. Im so glad this isnt a taxpayer project so we dont have to hear them whining about it even though they spend 100 times more on war. We could seriously make up alot of time if Billionares could get behind it for the good of humanity if nothing else. I can wish cant I?!