Paul Gilster of Tau Zero Centauri Dreams has posted another one of his fascinating articles on interstellar travel considerations.
His article starts with the following paragraph which I have included in an altered text bold font format.
The serious study of flight to the stars is a comparatively recent phenomenon. One of the early papers to take interstellar travel to a new level — and to my knowledge the first technical article on manned interstellar missions — was Leslie Shepherd’s ‘Interstellar Flight,’ which appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1952. These days we all tinker with sociology and psychology, musing about what drives a society spaceward, but Shepherd, a British physicist and one of the godfathers of today’s interstellar work, thought the reasons were obvious. We’ll go to the stars out of scientific curiosity and the pure love of adventure.
I like the way this guy thinks - big, fast, and far. To read the rest of the article, click here."No, we cannot reach the stars in ram jets or any other conventional impulse system. We need star gates." - Jack Sarfatti