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A worldship fleet, heading for a friendly star. Large rotating habitats, kilometers in diameter, contain all the requirements for trips that can take thousands of years. The fleet provides safety and redundancy for this exploratory journey to the stars. (ML)
What next? If we want to keep a mission focused mode of operation for Interstellar exploration, we need to define what follows the first robotic probes. We also need to plan for a sustainable architecture that will provide the services required for future missions.
What happens after the first mission depends greatly on the technological and social evolution of humanity in the coming centuries. It seems clear that if we can build a Robotic Starship, we can easily built other probes, since the resources required are small even at the scale of a planetary society, and tiny at the scale of an interplanetary society. The 20 000 tonnes of deuterium required for Firefly are an infinitesimal fraction of the deuterium in Earth's oceans, just as the He3 required for Daedalus is an infinitesimal fraction of what is available in the atmosphere of the gas giants(1). And the ships themselves are lighter than many sea going ships that exist today, although some technological elements will need to be very sophisticated. The main questions will not be technical, but in the realm of motivation and interest.
Abundance of the elements in the universe(1).
Explorers unload a vehicle from a lander. They have chosen the edge of a lake that can provide propellant by electrolysis, using an on board nuclear reactor. A sister planet looms over the horizon, in the dusty atmosphere of this Mars like world. Clouds in the sky show proof of a thicker atmosphere than Mars, perhaps thick enough to support life?. (ML with Terragen 4)
The overarching goal of space exploration: People in space exploring other worlds.
A launch schedule of one probe per decade, or even higher, would likely be sustainable, providing continuous scientific returns. We have identified dozens of stars within the reach of robotic probes that have planets, and new ones are continuously being discovered(2). Firefly or l'Espérance are not colony ships, and don’t have the capability to support human interstellar travel or colonization. But versions of them might act as facilitating agents. We could build on the expertise of robotic in situ resources utilisation, for example. Developed for a Mars and outer planets exploration and colonisation program, these ‘intelligent tools’ could be transported by automated starships such as Icarus to build fuel production facilities for return trips, lasers for light sails propulsion or inertial pellet based transportation systems(3)(4) for true two way travel.
The first robotic mission itself will continue long beyond its entry into the Alpha Centauri planetary system. The main exploration phase is planned over about a decade, but the vehicle should be capable of a much longer period of operation. Rather like Voyager 1 and 2, it is likely that Icarus will be able to accumulate and transmit new data, probably by using periods or dormancy and lower power usage between busts of transmission activity, for well over a century. It is, in fact, very likely that the vehicle will still be functional when a follow up probe comes along, and may still be operating to greet the first human Interstellar explorers.
If the industrialisation of the solar system takes off, we should expect the capabilities of an interplanetary society to be orders of magnitude higher than those of a single planet society(5). The energy available in space is many orders of magnitude higher than what can ever be provided on Earth alone. The infrastructure to use that energy may also profit from robotisation to reach gigantic proportions.
Power in the solar system
The total power available from the sun is 3,8e26 Watts.
The power required to drive a large Interstellar Worldship, 10 km in diameter and 75 km long for a 100 year trip to Alpha Centauri might be in the order of 4e9 GW. So if we tap into ‘only’ 1% of the sun’s power, we could power one hundred million worldships simultaneously.
Although such a level of activity seems improbable, it is within the realm of physical possibility and classical physics.
Firefly II. This follow up mission to Firefly is setting up a rotating habitat and extracting fuel from a gas giant at destination, using the same technology as proposed for Uranus mining back in the Solar System. The small moon provides raw materials and fuel for the atmospheric mining craft. Over the next few years the automated mission will create the infrastructure required for a future crewed vehicle’ arrival and return back to Earth. (ML)
Crewed Interstellar vehicles
Crewed Interstellar vehicles
If hibernation, cryosleep or some form of statis ever happens, crewed versions of the vessels described here should be possible. They would need to bring an in-situ fuel production infrastructure with them, or sent it ahead with a precursor robotic mission. This is the same idea as the one proposed by SpaceX for its Mars projects() and by Robert Zubrin for Mars Direct(), but at an Interstellar scale. Later, laser or pellet stream based beamers might make fusion propulsion obsolete for crews as well, leaving to fusion powered ships the role of precursors, travelling to new worlds to set up beamers for future travellers.
Eventually, Worldships(6) might be built. For these slow moving giants, automated supply ships similar to Icarus could serve to keep a link, however tenuous, to our original civilization as humanity and life spreads out between the stars.
Icarus Firefly serving as a rapid transport for a slower Worldship. The worldship can stay in contact with the parent world using smaller and much faster fusion vehicles. This reduces risk and allows the worldship inhabitants to profit from the advances happening at the home world. They are isolated, but not alone. (ML)
References
References
The Fusion Fuel Resource Base in our Solar System Robert G. Kennedy III, PE 1* 1 Institute for Interstellar Studies-US, Oak Ridge, TN, USA
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/
Geoffrey Landis, “Interstellar Flight by Particle Beam,” in Acta Astronautica Vol. 55, pp. 931-934 (2004). “Relativistic Particle Beams for Interstellar Propulsion,” JBIS, 46-4, April 1993. See also his
G.D. Nordley, “Interstellar Probes Propelled by Self-steering Momentum Transfer Particles” (IAA-01-IAA.4.1.05, 52nd International Astronautical Congress, Toulouse, France, 1-5 Oct 2001).
Finney and Jones, ‘Interstellar migration and the human experience’. University of California press, 1985
British Interplanetary Society. https://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/project-world-ship
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