Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The quest to send a physical probe to the nearest stars is heating up – renowned Physicist Stephen Hawking has teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, to launch a laser propelled space probe at 20% of the speed of light, on a 20 year mission to physically visit the nearest stars.
According to The Guardian;
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner launch $100m star voyage
Project to aim for sending a featherweight robotic spacecraft to the nearest star at one-fifth of the speed of light.
In an unprecedented boost for interstellar travel, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner and the world’s most famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking have announced $100m (£70m) for research into a 20-year voyage to the nearest stars, at one fifth of the speed of light.
Breakthrough Starshot – the third Breakthrough initiative in the past four years – will test the knowhow and technologies necessary to send a featherweight robot spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years: that is, 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres or 25 trillion miles.
A 100 billion-watt laser-powered light beam would accelerate a “nanocraft” – something weighing little more than a sheet of paper and driven by a sail not much bigger than a child’s kite, fashioned from fabric only a few hundred atoms in thickness – to the three nearest stars at 60,000km a second.
Milner, a Russian-born billionaire investor who began as a physicist, was one of the founders of the Breakthrough prizes, the biggest in science, announced in 2012 and awarded for fundamental research in physics, life sciences and mathematics. Last year, he and Professor Stephen Hawking of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge announced another $100m Breakthrough Listen initiative to step up the search for extraterrestrial life beyond the solar system. The project has just released its first data from stars within 16 light years of Earth. The entrepreneur describes science as his “hobby.”
WUWT recently suggested that NASA should be spending money on deep space missions, including a laser propelled interstellar probe, instead of squandering their budget, replicating climate work already being performed by other government agencies.
Thankfully it now looks like wealthy private individuals have picked up the ball which NASA dropped. The first mission to the nearest star will bear the Russian flag – but at least that mission now looks likely to happen.
That’s the problem with all you sciency tekological people.
All you do is kriticize and make problems whot mess up the glow when wots really obvius.
When the rest of us wot weally care and feel about stuff you shud aks us, and we will tell youse all about that data whotsit thingy stuff.
My grandmuder wot was watching “Survivor” when I aksed her said whot anybody nose the anser. So if my gran nose, why don youse?
She said you shud just yewse an extension cord.
So there to all you deniey sciency tipes.
The billion watt lasers will be satellite mounted in earth orbit.
What happens when hackers turn the laser beam towards earth!!
…spot-warming…
James Bond will stop them.
Screw that, what happens when the laser knocks itself out of orbit or sends itself out into space with the back thrust of its own beam? Newton’s laws still apply. If that photon has momentum, then it must have imparted an equal and opposite momentum on the satellite. Whether the satellite crashes to Earth or goes on an interstellar joyride of its own would depend largely on the direction that momentum was imparted.
Put a set of them in orbit. Each fires when on the side of earth facing the “kite”. They slow for 1/4 orbit then accellerate for 1/4. Net no change. Then 1/2 orbit to rest before the next turn…
Power per laser can be much smaller than total delivered by combined photons, though even 100 of them would have each one being large. Would need nuclear power on orbit to work… At 10^11 W / 1000 W/m^2 it would take 10^8 m^2 of sun. Or at 10% conversion sun to beam, a 1000 square km… That’s a lot to build and put on orbit…
Or I suppose we could send power up via microwave beam… just need to keep the birds and planes out of that arc of the sky… a billion Watts of microwaves can really cook your goose… Then again, 200 satellites (only half shining at a time) each with a 1000 MW nuclear plant, all on orbit night mess up your day too, eventually…
And these billion Watt lasers will be pushing against what exactly, to accelerate the kite sail ??
g
OT but you should have a look at this latest green lunacy.
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/gas-made-from-cheese-to-heat-hundreds-of-homes/comment-page-1/#comment-115584
This says it all “The project is going ahead thanks to a lucrative Government subsidy scheme which rewards homes and businesses for producing energy from renewable sources, in order to meet EU renewable energy targets and UK climate change goals.”
As a very occasional poster here at WUWT I’m a bit disappointed by some of the posts above. If Kennedy had listened to some of you guys maybe he’d have called the whole Moon shot off!
Yes this is uncharted territory with enormous technical challenges but are we human beings or not? This program can only advance our scientific and technical expertise. If someone other than Government wants to stump up the money and they’re serious about it, why not go for it? As others have rightly pointed out, the Space Program has always provided technological payoffs so why would this be any different? Does anyone imagine Hawking and Milner haven’t at least done some basic ground-work here? That instead they just tossed the proposal out there to liven up a quiet news day?
Like the early days of Sputnik and Mercury, this will only be the first baby step in a journey to the stars. At $100m I’d say we shouldn’t expect more than a Sputnik. But I bet even now there are Company CEOs and scientists thinking “Man, I’d love to get us involved in this”. It might fail or it might be amazing. But man, what a journey it will be! I commend Hawking and Milner and I hope I’m around long enough to see it become reality.
Geoff
If dumb ideas can’t stand a little ridicule, then did they ever stand a chance in the first place?
“Space travel is bunk.” – Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik, 1957.
If somebody proposed getting to the moon on a laser beam, he would have been right to call it off. People have been toying with this since the invention of the laser in 1961. In 1977, I read a NASA report that seriously considered a ground laser array of over 100 MW output beam power, to boost launch vehicles. It premised carbon dioxide laser technology, about at the “steam engine” end of the laser technology sophistication spectrum. Hasn’t happened yet and likely never to happen. Laser space propulsion is rather like commercial fusion power, always 20 years in the future!
“A 100 billion-watt laser-powered light beam would accelerate a “nanocraft” – something weighing little more than a sheet of paper and driven by a sail not much bigger than a child’s kite, fashioned from fabric only a few hundred atoms in thickness ”
Am I the only one to see a problem with a 100 billion watts of laser light focused on an area the size of a child’s kite?
Nope. Me too. Nice weapon, though…
Who is watching over Stephen’ medication these days.
He seems to be straying further and further from reality.
The problem is the media report this idea as if it is already done and sorted and we only need wait for the launch.
Personally all efforts should be going towards Mars and Europa, Jupiter’s moon that has liquid water. The best chance we have of finding life is there.
Mars can be colonised and maybe eventually the atmosphere altered and then as a result terraformed.
There are too many hodgepodge missions, some global focus on space exploration please. The ESA landing on the comet, how that was a Mission with real data brought back.
Mars Rover also a solid mission.
We need to get probes on Europa and Scientists on mars.
Who knows even build an underground complex on the moon, seeing as we can get equipment there in a days’ travel. Now that would be an accomplishment.
always looking further and further afield to feed intellectualism, there is much to be discovered on earth still, let along the solar system.
He always was beyond reality Obvious feature od a simple charlatan like bunch of others you can see on all these TV “science” channels…
Why on earth is all our space funding not going into our own solar system? We know very little about it.
I hear lots of these ideas, another is a submarine put in Europa’s oceans beneath the ice. That would be worth it!!
The original proposal (referenced here) suggests that the launcher would also be useful for accelerating much larger payloads on interplanetary missions. You only need to go featherweight if you want to send a payload to another star system in a reasonable time.
As always Eric, the issue is getting the payloads into space, that is where we have issues as we have to build larger payloads in space.
IMO, we can’t build a proper manned mars scientific mission craft on earth, it has to be built in space, as we are talking of what spending a long time there before returning, including a habitat and such as it is not feasible to carry all of your supplies with you.
Yes this idea about the nearest star is interesting but I suspect we are going to learn very little about the star, and we are lets be honest, we need to understand our own star better.
I just think it is a distraction. We have 7 planets to investigate more in-depth as well as our star.
Getting scientists on other planets should be the priority, our remote studies are too limited. We need good scientists on the ground to give missions the flexibility needed for such missions.
We cant focus on everything due to cost. Priority should be given to manned missions to Mars and investigating places like Europa.
Though I do agree, we always need better propulsion, not a bad thing.
“Our space funding?” As far as I can determine this is a privately funded proposal.
Call me Mr Suspicious, but this sounds like an excuse to build a 100 billion Watt laser without being accused of Star Wars style escalation to me.
We can’t supply clean water to Flint. Raw sewage overflows in every major city. And we spend money on this stuff?
There was clean water in Flint, until someone at the local authority decided to save some money on water treatment. Now the entire water supply system needs to be replaced.
Will this 100 billion watt laser be powered by Solar or wind ? Hawkings is CAGW follower, don’t ya know !!
Sure, first you gots to build a Dyson sphere and lines the inside with solar panels…(/sarc – my English is usually a tad better when I am serious)
..Tanx, I’m feel so much more edumacated !! LOL
So, what good is it to go there other than we could do it? The postage stamp sized craft won’t be able to send anything back. I mean it cool and all but I’d rather go to mars or the moons of Jupiter first.
Yes, it would be nice to get NASA involved is this. Turn their attention from idiotic climate forecasting fear mongering stuff to nonsensical deep space travel stuff. It would be a step up.
It would be better to leave government out of the seeking of universe focused knowledge, n’est ce pas?
John
There is all ready a small scale working device: Myrabo LightCraft.
Too bad it couldn’t return home. It could arrive back before it started.
OK, lets look at the math. V= (f X t )/m where V is .2C and mass is, say, 10g. Then
6×10^4km/sec = (f x t)/10g or
10g (6×10^4km)/sec = f x t …Oops, my calculator just overflowed.
Somebody want to help out here?
Government research is critical to America’s future. It pays back billions of dollars on every dollar spent.
‘In this study funded with an $856,000 NSF grant, three captive mountain lions were taught to use a treadmill. It took eight months of training before the cats were “comfortable on the treadmill.”
“People just didn’t believe you could get a mountain lion on a treadmill, and it took me three years to find a facility that was willing to try,” said one of the project’s key researchers.’
It is encouraging to see people with forwarding looking ideas on interstellar space study and exploration with the drive to implement them.
John
forwarding, make that forwardJohn
This sounds like a neat idea. I wonder how it will send intact data back and to what receiver? Radio electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light (duh, cuz they are light) which would be faster than its flight speed. Given that advantage, it will somehow need to keep track of its path to beam that radio wave back (or will it do that in all directions?) in a way that will preserve important information in an interpretative format through our non-vacuum atmosphere (think Wolfman Jack coming in and going out on your farm radio many miles away from a tower). Maybe they will be able to beam it back to an orbiting satellite that is sitting in an outer orbit?
Way cool. You go Steven (that said you need to rethink Climate Change – it isn’t human caused but it is threatening).
Assuming such craft manage to learn anything useful, how exactly are they planning on getting that info back to Earth?
The craft is going too fast to use the stars gravity to slingshot it back.
The craft lacks a radio of any kind, much less one with enough power to cross the light years between the earth and the nearest stars.
Well it’s privately which means they ain’t spending your dough or mine. So what’s the complaint?
a directed energy weapon in orbit with 100,000,000,000 watts of powah – what’s to complain about?
your child don’t need no freakin kite anyway, right?
I don’t see anyone complaining.
However if it’s still a free country, so we are permitted to ridicule those things we find ridiculous.
Alchemy was to Newton as AGW (and now interstellar travel) is to Hawking. Great minds, but not great in all ways.
In Newton’s defense, in his day, there was no evidence that alchemy was wrong. It was the best explanation they had of how chemistry worked.
In fact it was the alchemists, their experiments and notes that led to the development of the science now known as chemistry.
Just because they were wrong, doesn’t mean they were stupid.
Since we now regularly turn one element into another with gadgets from nuclear reactors to neutron canons, I’d assert that we do alchemy all the time… So Newton just didn’t have the right tools, nor realize that radioactive gold might be problematic and expensive…
IMHO, the alchemists were not wrong, and the result is nuclear power today, not just chemistry.
I think EM Drives are much more advanced already and have a better chance…
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/226475-hawking-zuckerberg-unveil-10b-plan-to-reach-alpha-centauri-in-20-years
more info
looks like a publicity stunt without the stunt; sizzle without the steak
Wow, that’s gonna take a lot of Solar panels to generate all that wattage !! Can anybody do the calculations ?? My calculator kept crashing !
Marcus April 13, 2016 at 10:11 am
Marcus they are talking about some how gradually storing up all the power for the laser.
We can’t ever store the existing energy that wind turbines and solar panels are creating. I wish them well. It would be great if they could solve energy storage problem. That would be a fantastic spin off tech.
michael
Arrg.. even ..must proof read
..Mark, how big would the battery have to be to store 100,000,000,000 watts of power in one spot ?? And how long would it take to charge using Solar panels ??
..Oops, Mike…D’oh !! ( I have to stop talking to myself )
I did it up above. No calculator needed. Works out to about 1000 square km.
(scientific notation and growing up using a slide rule is why I rarely use a calculator)
What is the weight of the laser that propells this featherlight space probe? How dos it communicate with earth?
The laser launching system stays HERE; or more probably, on the Far Side of the Moon. (That way, the laser launching cannon cannot be aimed directly at the Earth.) Or perhaps, built on some fairly substantial asteroids, because the light energy of the laser IS a propulsion system.
Looks like a Trojan Horse to me …nice anti-satellite weapon ?
“Hiding” in plain sight…..like a bright orange “rescue chamber” on the Halibut ?