Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles : The Two-Way : NPR Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles Embed Embed Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles Embed Embed Stephen Hawking discusses the "Breakthrough Starshot" space exploration initiative during a news conference Tuesday at One World Observatory in New York City. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize Foundation hide caption toggle caption Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize Foundation Stephen Hawking discusses the "Breakthrough Starshot" space exploration initiative during a news conference Tuesday at One World Observatory in New York City. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize Foundation On Tuesday, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a plan to send interstellar probes to the Alpha Centauri star system. The audacious project would use a giant laser on Earth to accelerate scores of postage-stamp-size spacecraft to nearly the speed of light. They would cross the void in just 20 years — virtually no time on the scale of interstellar travel.

The plan for " Breakthrough Starshot " laid out at the news conference looks both ambitious and exciting. But if it's really going to work, there are several down-to-earth problems these would-be star trekkers will have to overcome. Do You Have A Permit For That Planetary Laser? Starshot's tiny probes are supposed to be given a big push by a mammoth 100 gigawatt laser back on Earth. A laser that powerful could also fry anything in its path, including orbiting satellites. "If somebody says, 'Hey look, I'm concerned about you hitting a potential satellite,' " says Pete Worden, the project's leader. "We won't fire when it's in the way." Worden admits the people of Earth are unlikely to take the Starshot project at its word. "We anticipate that there would be international agreements in control of this," he says. The team will work with all countries to get the necessary permits in order. Article continues after sponsorship Houston, We Had A Problem ... Last Year Once the hundreds or thousands of probes leave our solar system, they would be on their own in more ways than one. Physics dictates that communications between Earth and the probes can't happen faster than the speed of light.

That means if one of the probes runs into trouble a light year into its journey, then it will take a year for its distress call to reach home. It will take another year for mission control's instructions to reach the little craft. It's safe to say that in the two years it takes to get help, the probe will have either fixed itself or died. Millions? Try Billions Milner, the Russian entrepreneur , has put up $100 million of his own money for the project. That sounds impressive, but in the space business, it's peanuts. The New Horizons probe that zipped past Pluto last year cost $722 million. Pluto is 3 billion miles from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 25 trillion miles away. In other words, getting 0.012 percent of the way to Alpha Centauri cost seven times as much as this week's pledged funding. Milner acknowledged this, but hopes his seed money can get things started. The "starchip" would be about the size of a postage stamp, Yuri Milner says, and the sail would be about a yard across.

Breakthrough Initiatives hide caption toggle caption Breakthrough Initiatives The "starchip" would be about the size of a postage stamp, Yuri Milner says, and the sail would be about a yard across. Breakthrough Initiatives Keeping The Project Alive. Literally Thus far, humanity has managed to send only one craft into interstellar space: the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977. In the time it's taken to get out there, many of the scientists and engineers involved in the program have moved on, retired or died. While Starshot hopes to make its journey in two decades, Milner admits it will take "a generation" to prepare for the trip. Keeping a workforce going for that long, and making sure that key knowledge about the complex project isn't lost along the way could be the final frontier — of the HR department. How Does ET Phone Home? Experts agree there is no proven technology that would allow something the size of a postage stamp (or even a cellphone) to send a signal across trillions of miles of interstellar space. Figuring out how to do it is a top technical priority for the Starshot team, and perhaps its most important challenge.

Without a reliable way to send pictures and data home, the entire mission could end in failure, warns Bruce Betts , director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. "If you could fly to a forest, and you could see a tree fall, but you can't mention to anyone, did it really matter?" The Futuristic Technology That Could Enable Interstellar Travel The Futuristic Technology That Could Enable Interstellar Travel Go to permalink Technically savvy scientists and engineers have put much effort into conceiving far-future technologies that might make possible near- light-speed travel. You can learn a lot about their ideas by browsing the web. It will take many centuries for humans to make any of those ideas real, I think. But they do convince me that ultra-advanced civilizations are likely to travel between the stars at a tenth the speed of light or faster. Advertisement Here are three far-out examples of near-light-speed propulsion that intrigue me. This post has been excerpted from The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne, available now on Amazon and Barnes and Noble . Thermonuclear Fusion Thermonuclear fusion is the most conventional of the three ideas.

R&D to develop controlled-fusion power plants on Earth was initiated in the 1950s, and full success will not come until the 2050s. A full century of R&D! That's a realistic measure of the difficulties. Advertisement And what will fusion power plants in 2050 mean for spacecraft propulsion by fusion? The most practical designs may achieve 100 kilometers per second, and conceivably 300 kilometers per second by the end of this century. A whole new approach to harnessing fusion will be required for reaching near light speed. A simple calculation shows fusion's possibility: When two deuterium (heavy hydrogen) atoms are fused to form a helium atom, 0.0064 (nearly 1 percent) of their rest mass gets converted into energy. If this were all transformed to kinetic energy (energy of motion) of the helium atom, the atom would move at about one-tenth the speed of light.1 This suggests that, if we could convert all the fusion energy of deuterium fuel into ordered motion of a spacecraft, we could achieve a spacecraft speed of roughly 1/10 the speed of light—and somewhat higher if we are clever.

In 1968 Freeman Dyson, a brilliant physicist for whom I have great respect, described and analyzed a crude propulsion system that, in the hands of a sufficiently advanced civilization, could achieve this. Thermonuclear bombs ("hydrogen bombs") are detonated just behind a hemispherical shock absorber that is 20 kilometers in diameter. The bomb debris pushes the ship forward, achieving, in Dyson's most optimistic estimate, a speed one-thirtieth that of light. A less crude design could do somewhat better. In 1968 Dyson estimated that such a propulsion system would not be practical any sooner than the late twenty-second century, 150 years from now. I think that's overly optimistic. Laser Beam and Light Sail In 1962 Robert Forward, another physicist whom I respect, wrote a short article in a popular magazine about a spacecraft with a sail, pushed by a distant, focused laser beam (Forward 1962). In a 1984 technical article, he made this concept more sophisticated and precise.

Advertisement Sponsored An array of solar-powered lasers in space or on the Moon generates a laser beam with 7.2 terawatts of power (about twice the total power consumption of the United States in 2014!). This beam is focused, by a Fresnel lens 1000 kilometers in diameter. It is focused onto a distant sail, 100 kilometers in diameter and weighing about 1000 metric tons, that is attached to a less massive spacecraft. (The beam direction must be accurate to about a millionth of an arcsecond.) The beam's light pressure pushes the sail and spacecraft up to about a fifth the speed of light halfway through a forty-year trip to Proxima Centauri. A modification of this scheme then slows the ship down during the second half of the trip, so it arrives at its destination with a speed low enough to rendezvous with a planet. (Can you figure out how the slow down is achieved?) Forward, like Dyson, imagined his scheme practical in the twenty-second century. When I look at the technical challenges, I think longer.

Gravitational Slingshots in a Black-Hole Binary My third example is my own wild—very wild!—variant of an idea due to Dyson (1963). Advertisement Suppose you want to fly across much of the universe (not just inter- stellar travel, but intergalactic travel) at near light speed in a few years of your own life. You can do so with the aid of two black holes that are orbiting each other, a black-hole binary. They must be in a highly elliptical orbit and must be large enough that their tidal forces do not destroy your ship. Using chemical or nuclear fuel, you navigate your ship into an orbit that comes close to one of the black holes: a so-called zoom-whirl orbit (pictured above). Your ship zooms close to the hole, whirls around it a few times, and then, when the hole is traveling nearly directly toward its companion, the ship zooms out, crosses over to the companion hole, and slides into a whirl around it. If the two holes are still headed toward each other, the whirl is brief: you zoom back toward the first hole.

If the holes are no longer headed toward each other, the whirl is much longer; you must park yourself in orbit around the second hole until the holes are again headed toward each other, and then launch back toward the first hole. In this way, always traveling between holes only when the holes are approaching each other, your ship gets boosted to higher and higher speeds, approaching as close as you wish to the speed of light if the binary is sufficiently elliptical. It is a remarkable fact that you only need a small amount of rocket fuel to control how long you linger around each hole. The key is to navigate onto the hole's critical orbit, and there perform your con- trolled whirl. I discuss the critical orbit in Chapter 27. For now, suffice it to say that this is a highly unstable orbit. It is rather like riding a motorcycle around a very smooth volcano rim. If you balance deli- cately, you can stay on the rim as long as you want. When you wish to leave, a slight turn of the bike's front wheel will send you careening off the rim.

When you want to leave the critical orbit, a slight rocket thrust will enable centrifugal forces to take over and send your ship careen- ing toward the other black hole. Advertisement Advertisement Once you are as close to the speed of light as you wish, you can launch yourself off a critical orbit toward your target galaxy in the distant universe. The trip may be long; as much as 10 billion light-years' distance. But when you move at near light speed, your time flows far more slowly than on Earth. If you are close enough to light speed, you can make it to your target in a few years or less, as measured by you— slowing down with the aid of a highly elliptical black-hole binary at your target, if you can find one! You can return home by the same method. But your homecoming may not be pleasant. Billions of years will have passed at home, while you have aged only a few years. Imagine what you find. Advertisement These types of slingshots could provide a means for spreading a civilization across the great reaches of intergalactic space. The princi- pal obstacle (perhaps insurmountable!) is finding, or making, the needed black hole binaries.

The launch binary might not be a problem if you are a sufficiently advanced civilization, but the slow-down binary is another matter. What happens to you if there is no slow-down binary, or there is one, but your aim is bad and you miss it? This is a tricky question because of the expansion of the universe. Think about it. As exciting as these three far-future propulsion systems may seem, they truly are far future. Using twenty-first-century technology, we are stuck with thousands of years to reach other solar systems. The only hope (an exceedingly faint hope) for faster interstellar travel, in the event of an earthly disaster, is a wormhole like that in Interstellar, or some other extreme form of spacetime warp. Adapted from The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne. Copyright © 2014 by Kip Thorne. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

$12 The Cost of Interstellar Flight Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration The Cost of Interstellar Flight by Paul Gilster on October 22, 2014 Sten Odenwald, an astronomer at the National Institute of Aerospace, takes aim at interstellar flight in a recent essay for the Huffington Post. Dr. Odenwald’s critique makes many valid points by way of showing how difficult the interstellar challenge is. I am much in favor of articles that do this, because putting a payload past or around another star is extraordinarily difficult, and every point that Odenwald raises has to be addressed by our science. Interstellar flight is also going to take buy-in from the public, whose economic resources will be in play to create the needed Solar System infrastructure and, eventually, the vehicles we will send on these journeys. That puts the economic issue up front, for while we can name a number of technologies that do not violate known physics — beamed sails, fusion drives, ion drives and perhaps one day, antimatter — we have to find the means of paying for their development. Thus a key part of Dr.

Odenwald’s critique, which draws on a study Andreas Hein did as part of the 2011 100 Year Starship study (citation below, and available in full text here ). Let me quote this: Andreas Hein, an engineer with the Icarus Interstellar Project, developed a rigorous method for forecasting the economics of interstellar travel, only to find that most economically plausible scenarios for a “Daedalus-type” mission would cost upwards of $174 trillion and require nearly 40 years of development and 0.4 percent of the world GDP. This would be for an unmanned, 50-year journey to Barnard’s Star using “fusion drive” technology. It consists of 50,000 tons of fuel and 500 tons of scientific equipment. Top speed: 12 percent of the speed of light.

The Project Daedalus design was created by members of the British Interplanetary Society back in the 1970s and grew out of an interest in the Fermi question: ‘Where are they?’ Enrico Fermi was pointing out that a universe as evidently full of resources as the one we live in should have spawned life aplenty, and he wondered at our lack of observation of it. Could it be, some wondered, that interstellar flight is just too difficult? In response, a BIS team decided to see if it was possible to conceive of a starship even with near-term technology, and we got Daedalus. Image: The Daedalus starship design as compared with a Saturn V. Credit: Adrian Mann . The behemoth starship would get us data from Barnard’s Star, though as a flyby mission, it would simply careen through any planetary system there, possibly dispatching planetary probes along the way.

If we were designing a starship today just as the BIS team did in the 1970s (as indeed Icarus Interstellar is doing right now) we wouldn’t create the same design, but take advantage of numerous technological advances in the interim, not the least of which are things like miniaturization of components. We’re still facing huge propulsion challenges, of course, because the fusion engine of Daedalus is still a long way from our grasp. But on the matter of economics, I think we have to take a broader picture. My thought is that the public will accept funding for an interstellar mission when such a mission takes up about the same percentage of GDP as other space efforts have, averaged across the years. In other words, we can design something today and figure out what it would cost, but over the decades economic growth and technological change would make that cost a smaller proportion of our total economy. Hein worked out a useful strategy for weighing these matters in his paper.

With regard to the fraction of GDP that is spent on spaceflight, he draws on a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and notes this in his paper: It is reasonable to take the value of the G7 here, due to their relatively high commitment to spacelight in comparison to other countries. For the US, the GDP fraction spent on spacelight is 0.295% and for the G7, an average of 0.084% was estimated in 2005. The space scenarios in Hein’s paper are created with these GDP figures in mind, with the additional caveat that not all of the space budget is devoted to exploration. In the US, for example, we have to factor in the percentage of the space budget used by the Department of Defense, not to mention other areas that are not related to exploration. We may, then, find the percentage of the space budget allocated for exploration to vary somewhere between 0.01% of global GDP and, in the most optimistic, Apollo-class situation, up to 0.4%. Interstellar probe costs then have to be weighed against these numbers.

Andreas is a friend and, as Centauri Dreams readers know, a contributor to these pages, so I thought I would ask him for a response to Dr. Odenwald’s article. He responded that he thought Odenwald had missed the point of his original paper: The whole point of the paper was to estimate when interstellar missions are going to become feasible between the 21st and 24th century from an economic point of view, given very rough estimates for their cost and a range of economic scenarios. The reason why this is interesting is that the world economy grows. This means that the world gets wealthier over time. At some point things get affordable that were thought too expensive before. It turns out that a Daedalus-type mission only gets feasible in some optimistic scenarios where the world economy grows significantly. Other, “cheaper” missions get feasible even for pessimistic economic scenarios. The amount of funding for an interstellar mission is simply derived from the fraction of current spending on space exploration. I think this is reasonable.

I would recommend that anyone interested in the economics of interstellar flight read Hein’s paper, which is titled “Evaluation of Technological/Social and Political Projections for the Next 300 Years and Implications for an Interstellar Mission.” Hein uses Gross Domestic Product as a key indicator and studies funding patterns from past space programs as a way of estimating how funding might emerge for an interstellar program. He also identifies two funding distribution patterns, a ‘triangular’ shape as in Apollo (where funding rises rapidly, peaks, and declines rapidly) and a ‘rectangular’ pattern as in, for example, ISS funding, where as seen on a graph, the funding distribution takes on a sustained level and holds it until phase-out. The upshot of all this is that given various political and economic situations, the potential dates for an interstellar mission fall from within the 21st Century to the 24th Century and beyond. We can look at a full-blown Daedalus-class mission, which he estimates would cost $100 trillion (not Odenwald’s cited $174 trillion).

Hein also works out an estimated $20 trillion for a ‘budget Daedalus,’ and comes up with $65 billion for a starship design similar to Freeman Dyson’s 1968 concept, a spacecraft powered Orion-style by the explosion of nuclear devices. Notice the range we’re talking about. There are economic scenarios in which programs for all three classes of starship could be initiated by 2300, and under which the Dyson-class spacecraft would begin program development in the relatively near future. High GDP growth could result in a full-scale Daedalus program getting underway as early as 2110. The most optimistic scenario, in which high levels of funding are sustained (the Apollo pattern rendered into the ‘rectangular’ mode), would produce earlier results but requires an unusual combination of factors, as Hein makes clear: The rectangular Apollo scenario is the most optimistic one of all four space program scenarios considered. It is probable if some extraordinary circumstances coincide: • Long-term consensus and sustainability of a global space program • Stable cooperation over several decades among many nations • High global commitment (0.4% GDP over 37 years) Today, these assumptions might be considered unrealistic.

However, over a time-span of 300 years even such low probability scenarios have to be taken into account. The degree of international cooperation today, as in the case of the ISS program, would have been impossible to imagine 200 years ago. This scenario only shows that given the right circumstances, a Daedalus-like probe can be launched in the 21st or 22nd Century. But is this the kind of probe we really want to launch? Tomorrow I’ll look at some of Sten Odenwald’s other criticisms of interstellar flight, some of which point, in my view, toward increased public engagement with deep space exploration while not ruling out future interstellar efforts. We can’t predict the future, but Andreas Hein’s scenarios cover a range in which interstellar flight becomes a reality within the next several centuries, and some a bit sooner than that. The paper is Hein, “Evaluation of Technological/Social and Political Projections for the Next 300 Years and Implications for an Interstellar Mission,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society Vol. 65 (2012), pp. 330-340 (issue available through the BIS ).

Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles | Nevada Public Radio Stephen Hawking's Plan For Interstellar Travel Has Some Earthly Obstacles 474238287_1937043283.jpg Breakthrough Initiatives The "starchip" would be about the size of a postage stamp, Yuri Milner says, and the sail would be about a yard across. by: Geoff Brumfiel On Tuesday, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a plan to send interstellar probes to the Alpha Centauri star system. The audacious project would use a giant laser on Earth to accelerate scores of postage-stamp-size spacecraft to nearly the speed of light. They would cross the void in just 20 years — virtually no time on the scale of interstellar travel. The plan for " Breakthrough Starshot " laid out at the news conference looks both ambitious and exciting. But if it's really going to work, there are several down-to-earth problems these would-be star trekkers will have to overcome. Do You Have A Permit For That Planetary Laser?

Starshot's tiny probes are supposed to be given a big push by a mammoth 100 gigawatt laser back on Earth. A laser that powerful could also fry anything in its path, including orbiting satellites. "If somebody says, 'Hey look, I'm concerned about you hitting a potential satellite,' " says Pete Worden, the project's leader. "We won't fire when it's in the way." Support comes from Worden admits the people of Earth are unlikely to take the Starshot project at its word. "We anticipate that there would be international agreements in control of this," he says. The team will work with all countries to get the necessary permits in order. Houston, We Had A Problem ... Last Year Once the hundreds or thousands of probes leave our solar system, they would be on their own in more ways than one. Physics dictates that communications between Earth and the probes can't happen faster than the speed of light. That means if one of the probes runs into trouble a light year into its journey, then it will take a year for its distress call to reach home. It will take another year for mission control's instructions to reach the little craft.

It's safe to say that in the two years it takes to get help, the probe will have either fixed itself or died. Millions? Try Billions Milner, the Russian entrepreneur , has put up $100 million of his own money for the project. That sounds impressive, but in the space business, it's peanuts. The New Horizons probe that zipped past Pluto last year cost $722 million. Pluto is 3 billion miles from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 25 trillion miles away. In other words, getting 0.012 percent of the way to Alpha Centauri cost seven times as much as this week's pledged funding. Milner acknowledged this, but hopes his seed money can get things started. Keeping The Project Alive. Literally Thus far, humanity has managed to send only one craft into interstellar space: the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977. In the time it's taken to get out there, many of the scientists and engineers involved in the program have moved on, retired or died. While Starshot hopes to make its journey in two decades, Milner admits it will take "a generation" to prepare for the trip.

Keeping a workforce going for that long, and making sure that key knowledge about the complex project isn't lost along the way could be the final frontier — of the HR department. How Does ET Phone Home? Experts agree there is no proven technology that would allow something the size of a postage stamp (or even a cellphone) to send a signal across trillions of miles of interstellar space. Figuring out how to do it is a top technical priority for the Starshot team, and perhaps its most important challenge. Without a reliable way to send pictures and data home, the entire mission could end in failure, warns Bruce Betts , director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. "If you could fly to a forest, and you could see a tree fall, but you can't mention to anyone, did it really matter?" Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit . More from: Top 10 Space Moments | Top 10 Everything of 2013 - Science and Space | TIME.com Top 10 Space Moments By Jeffrey Kluger Dec.

04, 2013 See the rest of TIME’s Top 10 of Everything 2013 lists here Ames / JPL-Caltech / NASA 10. The Galaxy’s Most Adorable Planet The cosmos don’t often get cute, but when it comes to a little world that goes by the prosaic name Kepler-37b, that rule got bent just a little. Discovered by the Kepler space telescope , the planet, which orbits a star 200 million light years from Earth , is only 2,400 mi. (3,860 km) across; and while that sounds big, it’s two-thirds the size of our own tiny Mercury and just 10% larger than the moon. Finding such a pipsqueak world was not easy. Kepler detects exoplanets by looking for the slight dimming of light as they pass in front of their parent stars in the course of their orbits. But 37b is small enough that it dims that starlight by just 0.2%. The star itself, however, happens to be an unusually steady one, with little flickering in its light output—and that made the detection possible.

As for life on Kepler 37b? Forget it. It’s so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit every 11 days. It is surely completely airless and blazingly hot—no place even to think of looking for biology. 9. The Coldest Place in the Universe Think you’re having a chilly winter? Be happy you don’t live in the vicinity of the Boomerang nebula, a cloud of gas left over from an ancient star, about 5,000 light years from Earth. Scientists have always wondered about the nebula’s unusual shape—which actually looks more like a bowtie than a boomerang—and this year got their answer, using the ALMA telescope (short for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in the Chilean desert. They found that the nebula is in fact spherical, but an especially thick band of dust absorbs some of the starlight reflecting off the grains. The rest glows in a bow-tie shape. The important detail for people who like their numbers big and record-setting, however, is the temperature. Parts of the Boomerang nebula clock in at -457.7°F (-272°C).

That’s about 2°F (1.1°C) above absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible according to the laws of physics. Even intergalactic space is warmer, as these things go, at -455°F (-270°C). 8. Colliding Stars Produce Gold Again and again you hear the question from the anti-space-travel crowd. Why spend all the money to go to space when we have problems right here on Earth? Well, if all the other answers about scientific discovery and the questing human spirit don’t satisfy them, how about this? Once in a while you might be able to collect enough pure gold to make up a few Earthly moons. Gold and other heavy elements came into being late in the universe’s early development, forged mostly by the pressure and heat within stars. But gold is so exceedingly heavy, it must take something especially explosive to cook it up. A leading theory has always been collisions between dense neutron stars. In 2013, NASA’s Swift telescope spotted a burst of gamma rays 3.9 billion light years from Earth that were consistent with such a cosmic crack-up.

A week later, the Hubble space telescope looked at the same spot and found a powerful concentration of infrared energy consistent with a burst of newly generated atoms with 3,000 times the mass of Earth. The signature of some of those atoms indicated they were a few moon’s-worth of pure gold. So if one collision between two stars can produce so much of the precious metal, why is it so rare? The answer is that those collisions themselves are rare, about one every 100,000 years in a galaxy like ours. Distribute that among a few hundred billion stars, and there’s just not going to be much to go around. 7. Saturn’s North Pole Hurricane Earthly hurricanes can be bad enough, with their 150 mph (240 k/h) winds and their Gulf-spanning size. But consider Saturn, where the Cassini space probe just discovered a north pole superstorm that makes anything we’ve ever seen on Earth look like an atmospheric sneeze. Just the eye of the storm is 1,200 miles (1,900 km) in diameter; the winds exceed 330 mph (531 k/h).

Cassini had already detected violent wind vortices at the pole, as did the Voyager spacecraft when it flew by in 1980 and 1981. But the Saturnian winter kept the pole turned away from the sun for the better part of 30 years and it was impossible to see exactly what was causing the disturbance. But at last Cassini got a good look as the planet’s spring began and the astronomers were stunned by the size of the tempest. The wind physics that drive a Saturn hurricane are much the same as those on Earth. But this hurricane, which has been raging for decades, clearly doesn’t require warm ocean waters for fuel the way our hurricanes do. It could, therefore, have a long and decidedly violent life ahead of it. 6. Tiny Galaxies and Dark Matter The Milky Way has a lot of little hangers-on. Lingering at the fringes of our 300-billion-star galaxy are 160 or so much smaller galaxies, known as globular clusters, with only a million or so stars each.

That seems like quite an entourage but it’s nothing compared to what’s going on 2 billion light years from Earth, at a galactic cluster known as Abell 1689, where 160,000 globular clusters have converged. Astronomers using the Hubble space telescope analyzed the distribution of Abell’s globular clusters and found that they concentrate most heavily near the center of the galactic formation. That provides clues to the behavior—and more proof of the existence—of the mysterious stuff known as dark matter, a still unidentified elementary particle that outweighs the rest of the mass in the universe by roughly six to one. Dark matter is thought to have gathered in gas and dust in the early years after the big bang, eventually leading to the formation of galaxies. If the models are correct, it should also draw smaller formations like globular clusters into the center of the heaviest collections of galaxies. And that’s precisely what happens at Abell 1689, with the tiny galaxies huddling in the heart of the larger herd of bigger ones. We may not be able to see dark matter yet, but the more we understand how it conducts itself, the less of a mystery it becomes.

University of Idaho / University of Arizona / JPL-Caltech / NASA 5. The Great Lakes—on Titan Moons are more than just craters and dust, and that’s especially so on Saturn’s Titan, a body that would be a fully certified planet if it were orbiting the sun on its own instead of leashed to its larger, parent world. Titan is awash in hydrocarbons—the fundamental building blocks of life–but the moon’s bitter -289º F (-179º C) temperature make it far too cold for biology to get started. Still, scientists have always been intrigued by Titan, partly because its essential chemistry makes it something of a flash-frozen version of the early, pre-biological Earth. Now, the Cassini space probe has discovered an even more Earth-like feature on Titan: a scattering of great lakes at its northernmost latitudes. The lakes are filled with liquid methane and ethane, and they even have dry aprons of material around them, like the salt deposits left at the perimeter of brackish Western lakes when some of the water evaporates.

Cassini was able to see the lakes after nine years on-site, only because Titan’s 30-year winter is at last coming to an end, allowing the clouds in its northern hemisphere to part a bit. Methane lakes and three-decade winters? No wonder life gave Titan a pass. 4. Chris Hadfield, the Singing Astronaut We learned nothing at all about astronomy, orbital physics or human biology in space when Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield performed his cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity aboard the International Space Station. And who cares? Hadfield had already made himself a huge cult figure with his prodigious Tweeting, photographing and performing in space. But it was Space Oddity that made him a global figure, with more than 19 million YouTube views so far. What is its appeal? The views from space, surely. The nifty look at the inside of the space station too. And the man can handle a guitar. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Space, to most of us, is a wholly alien place—one that other people visit. When it becomes a place of music, reverie, simple, happy playfulness, it becomes humanized, even poeticized.

Hadfield’s song did all that—and in a sense it made space more real and familiar than it’s ever been. 3. Twenty Billion Earths The galaxy became a lot less lonely this year, thanks to a discovery by the Kepler space telescope, which has been in space since 2009, doing a single, rather prosaic job: scanning the cosmos and taking the census of the number of planets orbiting distant stars. Just a generation ago, we couldn’t be sure that any such exoplanets existed, now Kepler has spotted 3,538 of them—though most still must be confirmed. The question was: how many of them are roughly the size of Earth, orbiting stars like our sun at a distance that would allow water to exist in a liquid state—the sine qua non for life as we know it? In November, a team of scientists arrived at the answer, and it’s head-spinning: there are approximately 20 billion earth-like worlds in the Milky Way. That conclusion took some extrapolation, of course. Kepler’s range of vision takes in only about 150,000 stars in a galaxy that has about 300 billion of them.

Within that tiny footprint of space, the satellite has so far found 10 planets that meet the criteria for Earthiness. Factoring up and adding some statistical secret sauce to the equations yielded the 20 billion figure. It’s inferential science, but probably reliable. Earth, you’re not as special as you thought. 2. The Chelyabinsk Meteor Strike The people of Celyabinsk likely had a lot on their minds on the morning of Feb. 15, 2013—most of it having to do with getting to work. What they surely weren’t considering was that a 10-ton asteroid was hurtling toward them, moving at 41,000 mph (67,000 k/h) and packing an explosive punch of 500 kilotons—or 20 to 30 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. But they definitely knew it when the rock exploded 14.5 miles (23.3 km) above ground, injuring 1,491 people and damaging 7,200 buildings.

It was that high altitude that preventedthe meteor from doing true Hiroshima-scale damage (and there of course would have been no radiation no matter what). But the emotional fallout was serious all the same. The solar system is and always has been a shooting gallery, with free-flying rocks everywhere. NASA and other agencies around the globe do a remarkable job of spotting, cataloguing and tracking them. That can help us prepare for their approach and, one day, deflect or destroy them en route. But nothing can prevent a rogue rock from sometimes slipping in under the radar. This year, one did, and we all got a little smarter—if a lot more nervous—as a result. JPL-Caltech / NASA 1. Voyager 1 Officially Leaves Solar System The Voyager 1 spacecraft did nothing this year that it hasn’t been doing pretty much every day since its launch from Earth in 1977—which is to say traveling out and away at about 35,000 mph (56,000 k/h).

But in 2013 everything nonetheless changed, when mission analysts announced that the ship had at long last left the solar system, becoming the first human-built object to set sail in the true deep waters of interstellar space. Just what the official exit ramp of the solar system would be was always open to question. The outer boundary of the solar system is defined by where the sun’s effects—in the form of the solar wind, the storm of charged particles that stream from it—are no longer felt. That transition point is known as the heliopause—but it’s not a clean line like an earthly border. Rather it’s a swirling, turbulent region, where interstellar particles collide and mix with ones from within the solar system. The key is when the lingering particles from the sun align with the interstellar magnetic field, and an increase in interstellar cosmic rays is detectable. That, as it turned out, happened in 2012, but it took a year of study to analyze and confirm the data. The confirmation has now been made, and Voyager 1 is well and truly gone. Its on-board nuclear power generator gives it about 15 more years life—which means 15 more years we can communicate with it.

After that, it will be a silent message in a bottle floating among the stars for eternity. Think we missed something? Tell us using hashtag #TIME2013 Queering Outer Space – Space + Anthropology – Medium Multiple-exposure-me under the Milky Way in Eastern Oregon. (photo: Nicholas Siegrist ) Queering Outer Space I could write academically about this topic (and I am elsewhere), but right now, I want to riff on some ideas that have been bubbling under the surface for a while, in conversations on I’ve had on twitter, and elsewhere. And write from my feelings as I listen to space discourse, and as I watch the direction of space programs. And I want to do it outside the rules of academic writing, which can be so stifling, and so unqueer. This is incomplete, full of mistakes, waiting for you to help me out, add your voice, point out where I messed up. I’ll keep editing as you do. It’s time to queer outer space. Since the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011, the U.S. space agency NASA has turned over much of the work on space transportation to private corporations and the “commercial crew” program.

As venture capitalist space entrepreneurs and aerospace contractors compete to profit from space exploration, we’re running up against increasingly conflicting visions for human futures in outer space. Narratives of military tactical dominance alongside “NewSpace” ventures like asteroid mining projects call for the defense, privatization, and commodification of space and other worlds, framing space as a resource-rich “frontier” to be “settled” in what amounts to a new era of colonization (Anker 2005; Redfield 2000; Valentine 2012). All your space are belong to us. (Air Force Space Command) However, from at least the 1970s, some space scientists have challenged this trajectory of resource extraction, neo-colonialism, and reproduction of earthly political economies with alternative visions of the future (McCray 2012).

Today’s “visionary” space scientists imagine space exploration as a source of transformative solutions to earthly problems such as climate change, economic inequality, conflict, and food insecurity (Grinspoon 2003; Hadfield 2013; Sagan 1994; Shostak 2013; Tyson 2012; Vakoch 2013). Elsewhere I’m doing research on all of this as a PhD student in anthropology, but here I want to argue that we must go even further than academically interrogating the military and corporate narratives of space “exploration” and “colonization.” We must water, fertilize,and tend the seeds of alternative visions of possible futures in space, not only seeking solutions to earthly problems which are trendy at the moment, but actively queering outer space and challenging the future to be even more queer. No idea what this is, but this is not what I mean by queering space— although it’s also INCLUDED.

(via Pinterist ) I’m queering the word queer here — I want to use it to call for more people of color, more indigenous voices, more women, more LGBTQetc., more alternative voices to the dominant narratives of space programs and space exploration. I want to use queer to stand in for a kind of intersectionality that I can speak from without appropriating or speaking on behalf of others, as a queer person. So by saying queer, I’m not trying to subsume other identities and struggles into the queer ones, but calling out to them and expressing solidarity and respect for difference in joint struggle, I’m inviting you all. I also don’t want to write “intersectionalize” outer space but it’s basically what I mean. So, when I use it here queer is not marriage equality and the HRC and heteronormativity mapped onto cis, white, gay, male characters ready for a television show. It’s also not me with my own limited corner of queer, minority, and disability experience. Queer is deeply and fully queer.

As Charlie, an awesome person I follow on twitter calls it: “queer as heck.” So in this way queer is also, if you’ll permit it, a call-out to mad pride, Black power, sex workers, disability pride, Native pride, polyamory, abolitionist veganism, the elderly, imprisoned people, indigenous revolutionaries, impoverished people, anarchism, linguistic minorities, people living under occupation, and much more. It’s all those ways that we are given no choice but to move in the between spaces of social, economic, and environmental life because the highways and sidewalks are full of other people whose identity, behavior, politics, and sensitivities aren’t questioned all the time, and they won’t budge. In a sense, it’s the old definition of queer as odd — because when they tell you that you don’t belong, you don’t fit it, you’re unusual, then you’re queer. It’s that feeling that you’re walking behind those five people walking side-by-side who won’t let you pass because you’re not one of them.

Queer is radical, marginal, partial, torn, assembled, defiant, emergent selves — queer is also non-human — from stones and mountains to plants and ‘invasive’ species. I know, you’re thinking: then what isn’t queer? But, if you’re asking that — the answer might be you. I. Queer Lives in Orbit When I began writing this, there were nine people living in outer space from five countries, as best as I can determine they are all cis-gendered, heterosexual men from the dominant ethnic/racial group of their nation (please astronauts, correct me if I’m wrong here). Crew of the International Space Station as of September 11, 2015 (via Twitter ) When the NASA space station motto declares “Off the Earth, For the Earth” we need to ask: which Earth? whose Earth? Beyond representation and tokenism which assumes “people of color” have a common racialized experience , we need to look to sciences where women, people of color, queer people, and others are fighting against great odds to participate in disciplines, be treated as colleagues, and have any visibility when we do .

Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (wikipedia) Astronaut Sally Ride was queer, a fact that wasn’t publicly revealed until after her death. Of 330 American astronauts , that means one has been identified as queer, and only after death. Part of this is certainly related to the fact that most astronauts came to the program through the military, which until recently didn’t allow queer identity to exist openly. This begs further and obvious questions about what we are bringing to space, what kind of culture? What ideas, traditions, and practices? Are they exclusively military? And what does that mean for our futures in space? Physician and astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space. If expressions of personal identity are seen as running counter to “scientific neutrality,” and are marginalized within science because of that — we have only to look to the history of science to see how un-neutral this normative notion of neutrality is. And how counterproductive this is for science and creativity (e.g., Kuhn on paradigms and scientific revolutions), and for honoring, respecting, and learning from indigenous knowledge and wisdom about the Earth and about space.

John Herrington (left) the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to fly in space. (photo: Mount Royal University ) Why shouldn’t expression, affect, sensitivity, and identity be a part of our movement into space? Aren’t we, in some sense, coming out as a species onto a galactic or even universe-scale stage? And aren’t we a diverse species, a colorful, even queer species with all of our material, emotional, architectural, technological accoutrement, and other fascinations? Perhaps we’ve been out for a while as a species, since our television and radio transmissions started leaving Earth and heading out into interstellar space. Although those transmissions started with Hitler and are currently mostly about Donald Trump and Kim Davis. So, when we talk about sending messages to alien civilizations, we may also want to talk about what we’re already saying. Carl Sagan talked about, quite rightly, how similar we all are when seen from space. And in my field of anthropology there are many debates about what it means to look at universals vs. particulars. Is focusing on difference a problem for justice and universal rights? We need to think about similarities, many will argue, not difference.

But sometimes the way we think about and promote similarity serves to erase differences — serves to whitewash, straightwash, genderwash, abilitywash people in an attempt to say that universal humanity is somehow represented by nine able-bodied, cis men floating in the International Space Station. But it isn’t. In Pale Blue Dot (1994), Carl Sagan wrote about the profound photograph of Earth taken from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager I spacecraft: Pale Blue Dot: Earth, the small dot in the top beam of light. Photo: NASA JP “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, ever king and peasant, every young couple in love, every moth and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” But it’s not just everyone you know and everyone you’ve heard of — it’s everyone you don’t know, everyone you’ve never heard of — all the marginalized, muffled, silenced, timid, and erased voices. All the many kinds of queer voices of Earth are also there, suspended in that sunbeam. This is why we have to stake a claim in the territory of space programs now. We need to add our voices, perspectives, plans, our cares. There isn’t time to wait. We can’t sit back and say: Space isn’t urgently important, we should be looking at problems here on Earth.

First of all, much of space science is looking at and working on problems here on Earth (from conflict, migration, and drought to climate change, deforestation, and more). Secondly, SpaceX, Boeing, and others are preparing new craft and taking humans into space now — and human technology is leaving the solar system. Perhaps it’s not happening on the timeline you would prefer, but it’s already happening and has been for decades, and they’re pretty much doing it without us because for the most part we’ve decided that it isn’t an area we want to engage in. II. De-colonizing Mars and Beyond When NASA received a signal from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 2012, they called it “the sound of interstellar space” and marked the data as the moment human exploration crossed into the “space between stars” (NASA JPL n.d.).

And while science and technology take us to the edges of the solar system and beyond, venture capital is planning how they can terraform new worlds — a neoliberal, capitalist project which has, of course, already stolen the phrase “Occupy.” In response, we need to pre-emptively Occupy Mars while taking one of the many important lessons offered by indigenous people to the Occupy movement, and de-colonize Mars in the process. Which means injecting all of our queer and indigenous selves into the discussions about “settling” and “colonizing” Mars, into these plans to fundamentally change the surface of another planet, to reproduce Earth there. Lisa Messeri , anthropologist and historian of science and technology, points out that if I use queering to mean something odd then something like Elon Musk’s plan to nuke Mars, for example, might be seen as queer . Her excellent question about this and our chat on Twitter inspired me to clarify. I’m looking at Musk’s terraforming language from the position that Mars is already queer. Remaking Mars in Earth’s image, and uncritically assuming this is a great idea, is exactly the kind of process that queering works against.

Nuking mars is an unqueer thing to do because it uses the model of razing and rebuilding, cutting it all down to make it possible to build a normative landscape on top of the ruins. We need to think about the ways that terraforming is not always a utopian idea, but can also be seen as a violent imposition of earthly normativity on landscapes elsewhere, a colonialization of existing queer-otherworld landscapes. Elon Musk, CEO SpaceX, wearing an “Occupy Mars” t-shirt. Biologist DNLee has asked exactly the kind of questions about Elon Musk’s language and the discourse of Mars colonization that need to be asked: “Who’s version of humanity is being targeted for saving? And with the language of proposed interplanetary exploration and settlement using generous references to Christopher Columbus and New World Exploration and British Colonization and US American Manifest Destiny I was halted. I’m not on board for this type of science adventure. […] Why aren’t other voices and perspectives at the table?

How much is this conversation being controlled (framed, initiated, directed, routed) by capitalist and political interests of the (few) people at the table?” Social scientists, activists, queer theorists and others need to ask themselves why they aren’t asking these same questions (and joining those of us who are). Aside from a few examples, why have sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences and humanities left space science and exploration alone — why do they consistently fail to recognize the importance of work by those who do research in these areas? Astrobiologist David Grinspoon critiqued this frontier mentality early on . Writing about the ethics of colonizing Mars in 2004, he notes that it’s not only problematic for all of the above reasons, it also sets us up to reproduce the failures that come with thinking we can “conquer” a planet: “If we go to Mars with the idea that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our efforts are doomed […] Mars does not belong to ‘America,’ nor to Earth, nor to human beings.” As DNLee also points out, we’re talking about widespread discourse with massive national and corporate funding to support a new era of colonization — isn’t this a subject worth studying?

Worth funding studies of? Worth getting involved in? Space scientists are also working on the problem of how we can create the capabilities to visit another star, trying to figure out what we need to do now here on Earth to make that happen in 100 years. There are many interstellar projects, and it’s a fascinating convergence of calls for longer-term thinking with planning and innovation in space science. When astronaut Mae Jemison describes 100 Year Starship — the project to achieve interstellar travel — she talks about creation stories, mythology, science fiction, and her hopes of “discovering a better version of ourselves in space” (100YSS 2014). We can join with visionaries like her to ensure that the “better version of ourselves” isn’t a vision that ends up reproducing inequality, injustice, and oppressions from Earth out there in space. Space advocates like Jemison, the first black woman in space, will be leaders and allies in the quest to discover not only diversity in outer space but a better kind of diversity — one that is aware of colonial histories, oppressive pasts and presents, ongoing violences here on Earth. A queer diversity. III.

Extraterrestrial Allies The Interstellar Message Composition program at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) advocates sending messages across the stars because “the universe beckons” (Shostak 2015). I happen to agree — there’s a lot out there and if there wasn’t life elsewhere, life that we might be able to talk to, it would certainly be “an awful waste of space” (as Carl Sagan wrote). And yet on the flip side when NASA releases vintage-style travel posters for newly discovered exoplanets featuring apparently white, binary-gendered, human couples, what message are we already sending both to Earth and beyond ? That we expect the entire universe to look at act like us? Not all of us of course, just the elite few, the white, cis-gendered, heterosexual colonialist aristocracy in evening wear. NASA’s binary gender, heterosexual, nightlife in space poster. I realize this is supposed to be a light-hearted poster and it’s “all in good fun” — so even writing this critique makes me sound like I’m absolutely no fun. Quite the opposite, I think that poster is no fun! Why couldn’t it depict other life?

Like multi-gendered whale-cats dancing instead? Or humans who don’t look like these two? Or something else, anything else — anything otherwise. Where is the imagination? Is this transposition of earthly aristocrats into space the best we can do? It’s more evidence that we need queer visions of life elsewhere, of exoplanets, of alien worlds. We need more of what Haraway (2013), drawing on Marleen Barr (1992), calls “speculative fabulation.” Illustration of contact with alien life for a NYT Op-Ed by Seth Shostak, SETI (Image: Kilian Eng) This isn’t just me saying “what about my ideas” or “include me in your game” — because we’ve actually been there since the beginning. We’ve been imagining different worlds since we were born into a world where we often weren’t wanted, didn’t fit, and weren’t following the rules by just being us.

Queer folk, of all kinds, are at least united by having the most incredible skills in speculative fabulation— in envisioning every possible different future, bright and abysmal, and we do it because it’s something we learned as a survival tactic and later honed as an art form. IV. Generations of Queer Futures Queerness has been discussed and debated in terms of the concept of “no future.” When thinking about outer space, this could mean the freedom to disrupt normative futures — to remix, twist, adjust, tear, collage and queer the future. As anthropologist Naisargi Dave said about the idea: “I think queerness is precisely about what it means to pursue an orientation to the world, philosophically and politically, that doesn’t need to reproduce itself in recognizable forms.” Being freed from recognizable reproduction means opening up multiple possible futures, even queer futures. Intelligent residents of Earth who do not seem very interested in structurally oppressing one another. When space science and fiction imagines a “generation ship,” in which generations of crew live and die during a thousand-year voyage to a distant star (e.g., Ceyssens et al.

2012), we should ask how queer lives fit into these models of reproduction in space. In the recent Sci-Fi series Ascension (Williams 2014), queer people were excluded from a generation ship experiment. When one character said “homosexuals” or “anyone who avoids procreation” were left out because they’re “superfluous”— a queer character responded: “We do tend to pop up where you least expect us...” If we consider science fiction as a “repository of modifiable futures” in science (Milburn 2010) then we can look at how to de-colonize that fiction and challenge the reproduction of normative futures through imagination and science.

William Lempert has examined the way indigenous Sci-Fi does this in his article “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film” (2014), and a recently published collection of science fiction stories from social justice movements “Octavia’s Brood” (Imarisha and Brown 2015) reminds us that imagination, as philosopher John Dewey said, is our “common faith” (1934) — the shared human capacity to conceive of a better future and work together to make it a reality. Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space, appearing as an extra on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with Levar Burton. Science fiction is a “repository of modifiable futures” not only in science but also in society. Sci-Fi has been a site of racism , sexism, and xenophobia, as often as it has been the site of imagining better worlds and liberation (Haraway 2013). The recent battle over the Hugo awards demonstrates the lengths that some will go to to protect their visions of hostile, racist, misogynist, anti-queer, normative futures. So what’s next?

We — all us queer, trans, disabled, black, native, etc. folk and more — we need to fight back, take back, de-colonize and re-imagine our futures in outer space, we need to pop up where they least expect us. Please Cite as: Oman-Reagan, Michael P. 2015. “Queering Outer Space.” Space+Anthropology, September 12. Michael Oman-Reagan is an anthropologist of space, science, & social movements. His doctoral research in the Department of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland examines space science, interstellar space, SETI, astrobiology, plants in space, and speculative fiction. References 100YSS. 2014. Let’s Make Human Interstellar Travel Capabilities a Reality Within the Next 100 Years. Anker, Peder. 2005. “The Ecological Colonization of Space.” Environmental History 10: 239–68. Barr, Marleen S. 1992. Feminist Fabulation: Space/postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Ceyssens, Frederik, Maarten Driesen, and Kristof Wouters. 2012. “On the Organisation of World Ships and Other Gigascale Interstellar Space Exploration Projects.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 65: 134–39. Grinspoon, David. 2003. Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life. New York: HarperCollins. Hadfield, Chris. 2013. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Toronto: Random House Canada. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2013. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, no. 3 (November). Imarisha, Walidah, and Adrienne Maree Brown, eds. 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland, CA: A K Press. McCray, Patrick. 2012. The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. Milburn, Colin. 2010. “Modifiable Futures: Science Fiction at the Bench.” Isis 101 (3): 560–69. doi:10.1086/652685. NASA JPL. 2015. “Voyager Enters Interstellar Space — NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.” Accessed April 5. Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sagan, Carl. 1994. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House. Shostak, Seth. 2013. “Are Transmissions to Space Dangerous?” International Journal of Astrobiology 12 (01): 17–20. doi:10.1017/S1473550412000274. — — — . 2015. “Should We Keep a Low Profile in Space?” The New York Times, March 27.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse. 2012. Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Edited by Avis Lang. New York: W.W. Norton. Vakoch, Douglas A. 2013. Astrobiology, History, and Society: Life Beyond Earth and the Impact of Discovery. Berlin; New York: Springer. Valentine, David. 2012. “Exit Strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans in Space.” Anthropological Quarterly 85 (4): 1045–67. Williams, Stephen. 2014. “Ascension.” Ascension. Canada, United States: CBC/Syfy. Anthropologist of space, science, and imagination. Follow

Question: What must an earthly spacecraft exit for its travel to be interstellar?
Answer: The Solar System