Starship Blog

It’s been an exciting year for space exploration. We saw the space probe Rosetta encounter a comet, we saw the successful flight of the NASA Orion capsule, and SpaceX continues to impress us all with its tremendous reusable launcher capability. And yet more countless worlds discovered around other stars.

We live in an age where we are now aware of countless thousands of planets out there in the galaxy, orbiting other stars. This is an exciting discovery which must surely urge us onwards to go discover what is truly out there. But getting there is no easy trick.

Mind uploading opens up exciting opportunities for interstellar flight.

Director Rob Swinney braved the Friday afternoon rush hour to drive deep in to the suburbs of Manchester, England to give a talk to the Philsoc of Manchester Grammer School (MGS), Withington High School and Manchester High School for Girls. This Philsoc had run in some guise for nearly 150 years where the sixth formers of originally MGS organised stimulating talks from the boys themselves and later from natural philosophers and scientists of some renown.

Back in May 2014 when members of the initiative for interstellar studies derived our articles of incorporation, we also spent some time putting together a founding principles document, which we are now releasing. This is meant to act as a guide and to remind the future generations of our original intentions. The text for the […]

It’s a real privilege to chat to such a visionary who has set so many things in motion from the Daedalus study in the 1970s to Skylon today. It was exciting to hear how tantalisingly close SABRE and Skylon are to fruition and how they will impact the activities of the Institute. Indeed, Alan and his work are undoubtedly one of the great inspirations behind the Initiative.

We are pleased to announce that the Initiative for Interstellar Studies has just launched four MSc projects in collaboration with the International Space University with the students dealing specifically with interstellar-themed topics.

Space Colony Earth launches a new $75,000 fund raising campaign to complete the development of their family ARKhives. This is their plan for a back-up to Earth. Space Colony Earth has a team of people working around the world working on this campaign including team members in the U.S, Europe, Asia and South America. Their intentions are that the family of ARKhives will be something valuable to people everywhere.

In the earlier blog article, we discussed the meaning of the term “Starship”; itself a joining of the two separate words “star” and “ship”. There are many types of Starships depending on whether they are robotic or crewed, slow or relativistic, precursor missions or full interstellar, small payloads or entire world ships. In this article we continue the examination of this term to help us to understand its meaning. This series of articles, “The Starship Travellers” is really a philosophical exploration of the meaning of the term “Starship”.

Initiative researcher Austin Tate begins the construction of a virtual meeting room for members of the Initiative to hold technical discussions. With a global network of members, these sorts of tools will be important for the future to ensuring everyone feels involved.