Like many boys growing up in 1950s England, Gerald Webb dreamed of the stars. He followed the exploits of the British Buck Rogers—Dan Dare, “pilot of the future”—and was thrilled by the launch of Sputnik in October 1957. Unlike most boys, Webb followed his dream. He joined the British Interplanetary Society at age 16, earned a degree in physics, and was helping to build payloads for sounding rockets when the society asked for volunteers for a new project: designing an interstellar probe. The team met every few weeks at a pub, The Rising Sun, and in 1978 produced the world’s first detailed plan for a starship: Daedalus, a 60,000-ton agglomeration of spheres, disks, and cones with an engine nozzle big enough to cover Trafalgar Square.
After that, Webb lost touch with the stars for a while. He stayed in the space business, becoming an aerospace consultant and helping to start a company that brokered satellite launches on Russian boosters, but the scope of his work was limited to Earth orbit.
On an unusually mild afternoon last August in Dallas, though, the stars once again feel within his grasp. Webb has joined about 200 other attendees at Starship Congress, a conference dedicated to promoting interstellar travel. The discussions range from solar sails to distributed databases, warp bubbles to game theory, exoplanets to international monetary policy. Session chairs periodically call on Webb, a sort of minor rock star among the interstellar crowd, for comments or to lead off the questioning.
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