The fastest a person has ever traveled is just 24,791 miles per hour. The three men of Apollo 10 went that fast on their way back from the moon in 1969.
The fastest a manmade object has ever traveled is 39,000 miles per hour—the speed with which Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977, is leaving the solar system.
David Neyland wants to beat these dusty, decades-old records. Neyland is a tall man, with the bushy beard of a frontier prophet and the measured tones of a midranking bureaucrat. He is both of these things. The head of the tactical-technology office at the military research agency DARPA, he convened a group of more than 1,000 at the Orlando Hilton last weekend to strategize about the next great era in space travel. The mission of the 100-Year Starship Public Symposium: to set about organizing a century-long effort to send a spaceship to another star. Neyland opened the conference to the public, drawing sci-fi fans and space geeks along with professional scientists. Ph.D. or not, all were frustrated with the lack of progress in space. As one wag in the audience would say, we should be having this meeting at the lunar Hilton. There was a sense that, for the just over 40 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, nothing new has been done.
The symposium was far-reaching, with presentations including “Modular Aneutronic Fusion Engine for an Alpha Centauri Mission” and “To Humbly Go ... Breaking Previous Patterns of Colonization.” The meat of the conference was hard science: the physics and engineering of propulsion. The dessert, which drew in the public, came in the form of sessions on space and religion (“Did Jesus die for Klingons, too?”) and panels with sci-fi writers.
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