interstellar travel
What’s the Most Effective Way to Explore our Nearest Stars?
It was 1903 that the Wright brothers made the first successful self-propelled flight. Launching themselves to history, they set the…
NASA Selects Bold Proposal to “Swarm” Proxima Centauri with Tiny Probes
Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it…
Is Humanity Ready to Realize the Dream of Interstellar Travel?
For generations, humans have dreamed, speculated, and theorized about the possibility of journeying to distant stars, finding habitable planets around…
Universe Today Interviews Author, Engineer & Technologist Les Johnson About the 8th Interstellar Symposium
Universe Today sat down with NASA technologist, engineer, and author Les Johnson as he talked about some of the highlights…
A Novel Propulsion System Would Hurl Hypervelocity Pellets at a Spacecraft to Speed it up
A new proposal for a pellet-beam spacecraft could enable interstellar missions and a Solar Gravitational Lens in a matter of…
Lightweight Picogram-Scale Probes Could be the Best way to Explore Other Star Systems
Inspiration for space exploration can come from all corners. One of the most inspiring, or terrifying, sources of inspiration for…
Birds use Dynamic Soaring to Pick Up Velocity. We Could Use a Similar Trick to Go Interstellar
A new proposal for an interstellar mission shows how a solar sail could use the same technique birds do to…
New Calculations Show That an Interstellar Bussard Ramjet Drive Would Need a Magnetic Field Stretching 150 Million Kilometres
A new analysis of the fabled Bussard Ramjet shows that the spacecraft would need an impossibly big magnetic field to…
Avoiding the Great Filter. How Long Until We’re Living Across the Solar System?
According to a new study, humanity could become an interplanetary species in this century, interstellar by the 23rd, and intragalactic…
Sending a Spacecraft to Another Star Will Require a Million Lasers Working Together
New research from the Australia National University shows that millions of lasers are the way to propel Breakthrough Starshot on…