Project Icarus’ goal is to achieve interstellar flight by 2100. Meanwhile, we haven’t left Earth orbit in 41 years. http://t.co/gAxkLJYUUN
Project Icarus’ goal is to achieve interstellar flight by 2100. Meanwhile, we haven’t left Earth orbit in 41 years. http://t.co/gAxkLJYUUN
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Just to be clear, the Icarus project is for non-manned interstellar flight.. We haven’t left orbit for manned missions in the last 41 years, but we’ve certainly launch a few long range craft. The Icarus site you linked has a number of ongoing projects, (the Icarus project proper being one) some manned, some not. I also found it interesting the Icarus project itself was started in 2009 and was supposed to be a 5 year project, so if they are on track, they would be winding down by now. But the link asking for volunteers is still up so I suspect they are falling a bit behind on that schedule. And the last bit of interesting tidbit was that one of the groups that founded the project was the “Tau Zero Foundation”. I initially assumed they are familiar with Poul Anderson’s great novel “Tau Zero”, but now I’m wondering if the Tau constant with regards to interplanetary flight speed was something that predated the novel. (I’m well aware that the Tau constant was certainly around long before that. I still remember the capacitor dis/charging formula.)