This was the first of the technical workshop days to take place in the main auditorium lecture theatre at the City University New York Brooklyn Campus on Jay Street. The day was chaired by Kelvin F. Long, Executive Director and co-founder Initiative for Interstellar Studies and Chairman Institute for Interstellar Studies USA. The main topics to be covered were broadly described under the 'Reaction Engines' theme.
The day welcomed the first talk from Robert Kennedy discussing fusion fuel resources in the Solar System. This was followed by Michel Lamontagne on radiator designs for starships and then Robert Freeland on the plasma dynamics of a Z-pinch fusion engine. During the discussion sessions later there was much scrutiny of the electron and ion charge separation in the Firefly design and analogues were made with electric Hall Thrusters. There was also an excellent talk from Regina Sullivan from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works team discussing the High Beta Cusp compact fusion reactor design her team had been working on. Ryan Weed from Positron Dynamics discussed the use of positrons to catalyse DD fusion reactions. Samuel Cohen discussed the application of a direct fusion drive to an interstellar mission using the DHe3 reaction. Ray Sedwick from the University of Maryland discussed continuous electrode inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. The final talk of the day was given by the workshop secretary Elena Ancona, on the subject of combined thermal desorption and electrical propulsion on sail craft using space environmental effects. A full report on these discussions will be compiled for the i4is Principium magazine.
During the evening of Tuesday 13 a dozen people assembled at the house of Gregory Matloff and C Bangs, where over wine and pizza, we discussed quantum consciousness, the meaning of life, art, music, cosmology, space propulsion and enjoyed many toasts, including one to Mileva Maric, former first wife of Albert Einstein, for whatever role she may have played in his early success.
