<div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:12.8px"><i>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.</i></span><div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><i><br></i></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">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.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">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.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">I leave the calculations as an exercise for the students. Anyone? Anyone? Spike?</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">steve</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px"><br></span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Adrian Tymes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:atymes@gmail.com" target="_blank">atymes@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class=""><p dir="ltr">On Apr 15, 2016 5:05 AM, "Anders Sandberg" <<a href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>> wrote:<br>
> Do you really think nobody can pull off a 20 year long project?</p>
</span><p dir="ltr">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.</p>
<p dir="ltr">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.</p>
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