[ExI] Breakthrough Starshot - To The Stars!

[Stephen Van Sickle]

*I know of no examples that are single mission organizations with nothing
to do (and thus, no reason for people to continue participating in or
remember them) for years at a time.*

Why would they have "nothing to do?"  The major cost is in engineering and
the capital cost of the laser array.  Keep sending probes.  Use the laser
array for other uses such as a telescope array, or much slower (and
massive) local spacecraft, or super lidar for astronomical uses.

Now there is a thought.  Why bother with a payload?  What could you see
with a 100 GW laser array and the telescope array that goes with it, using
it as lidar?  The "probe" would be 5 times faster.  And you can gather data
for far longer than 2 hours.

I leave the calculations as an exercise for the students.  Anyone?
Anyone?  Spike?

steve



On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Apr 15, 2016 5:05 AM, "Anders Sandberg" <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> > Do you really think nobody can pull off a 20 year long project?
>
> There exist organizations that can do this.  I know of no examples that
> are single mission organizations with nothing to do (and thus, no reason
> for people to continue participating in or remember them) for years at a
> time.
>
> Now, a foundation that was doing shorter missions - say, using the tech to
> get better data about the outer planets, and/or map and survey all of our
> solar system's large asteroids - while waiting for the results of this one
> interstellar mission might continue to exist long enough.  But that
> wouldn't be as sexy, so I do not expect them to seriously consider
> suggestions of thus sort.
>
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