[Cross-posted from the IdeaFestival] Another in a continuing series of "five question" email interviews - most recently with prodigious savant, author of "Born on a Blue Day" and speaker at IdeaFestival 2010, Daniel Tammet - the latest exchange features the expansive thinker Paul Gilster, the man behind the popular web site Centauri Dreams. Paul graciously provided the IdeaFestival with the following answers to its questions.
Read on to find out how he might write the first sentece of a story reporting the discovery of a "second Earth."
Paul, could you briefly describe your interests and work?
I started thinking about an interstellar probe back in the 1980s, while watching Voyager 1 and 2 explore the outer planets. There was a speed-of-light delay involved in communications that fascinated me, and I soon asked myself what it would be like to be working on a mission where the delay time was in years rather than in hours. Proxima Centauri is 260,000 times farther from us than our own Sun, after all -- how would be manage such a mission, how would we send it updates, software fixes, and so on?
Then Dan Goldin started talking about an interstellar probe at NASA (this was in the late '90's), and for a brief time we had serious discussions of the idea among people within the agency. Goldin said "We have to set goals so tough it hurts -- that it drives technology -- in semiconductors, materials, simulation, propulsion." My Centauri Dreams book grew out of that, and the subsequent Web site is an attempt to keep track of these technologies and the exoplanet investigations that are ongoing as well. I want to highlight both the extent of the problem, in terms of distance and time, and to emphasize the case that we'll one day manage to make such a journey, even though it might be centuries before we're ready to go. So just as I write and talk about interstellar journeying, I also think a lot about long-term approaches to science, and the need to focus on small goals that can one day pay off in a major breakthrough. Thus my favorite quote, from Lao Tzu: "You achieve the great thing through a series of small acts."
Read more...
Here is an image of the integrated flight model of KySat-1 taken just prior to last week's formal mission readiness review.
In this brief audio clip, University of Kentucky professor Jim Lumpp describes the recent installation and powering up of the first NanoRacks Platform on the International Space Station.
As described by University of Kentucky Prof. Jim Lumpp in the audio below, Kentucky Space carried out an internal mission readiness review this week in advance of the formal review scheduled with NASA launch services during the delivery of the KySat-1 next week to CalPoly. It was the culmination of a great deal of work designing, building and testing Kentucky's first spacecraft, and as Dr. Lumpp says in the clip, "the team is ready."
