This is a time of transition and upheaval for human spaceflight. Earlier this year the Space Shuttle program came to an end, a little over 30 years after its first flight. After an extended period of uncertainty prompted by the Obama Administration’s decision to cancel the Constellation program, NASA now has in place plans to build a new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System, as well as the Orion spacecraft, but with no guarantee that the budgets will be there over the long term to support their development. Meanwhile, commercial ventures are making progress on both suborbital and orbital vehicles, the latter to support the International Space Station, but at slower paces than previously anticipated.
In other words, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about building starships.
That might not seem like the obvious takeaway from the current state of affairs, but the prospect of at least laying the intellectual foundation needed for sending spacecraft beyond the solar system attracted 700 people to Orlando from September 30 to October 2. The 100 Year Starship Study Symposium, jointly organized by DARPA and NASA, was the most public part of the year-long effort by the agencies to study how to maintain a century-long focus to develop interstellar spacecraft, and spin off technologies along the way (see “It’s not (just) about the starship”, The Space Review, June 20, 2011). And that meant answering some critical questions about traveling to other stars—or, at least, figuring out the right questions to ask.
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