PROJECT DAEDALUS PLAN TO PROBE DEEP SPACE WITH A NUCLEAR STARSHIP

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34133, 21 April 1976, Page 14

PROJECT DAEDALUS PLAN TO PROBE DEEP SPACE WITH A NUCLEAR STARSHIP

(By

NEIL ROSS.

in London, for the Sydney "Sun-Herald")

(Reprinted by arrangement)

Plans for a nuclear starship capable of exploring deep space are being prepared by a study team of British scientists. The robot starship, propelled by a series of nuclear “explosions.” would travel at speeds of nearly 13 per cent of the speed of light. At its fastest, scientists envisage, the starship could orbit the earth in one second.

The planned destination of the starship is Barnard’s Star, more than 35 million million miles — or six light years — away. It would take 40 to 50 years for the craft to reach the alien solar system. Codenamed “Project Daedalus,” the plans for the starship are the work of a dozen scientists under the auspices of the British Interplanetary Society. Mankind already has the technology to explore and colonise its own solar system but time and distance, the twin problems posed by the vastness of deep space have, in the past, seemed insurmountable. Now’, a preliminary report published in “Spaceflight,” the journal of the 8.1.5. offers real hope that the stars are also within man’s reach. The report summarises the work of the scientists in the last two years and concludes that their feasibility study of a vehicle for an Interstellar Mission is realistic. “Interstellar flight w’ould appear at the moment to be a feasible proposition both to the human race, and by implication to any other civilisation in the universe, with at least our own capabilities.” it said. A similar group of engineers and physicists from the 8.1.5. laid the theoretical basis for landing men on the moon 35 years ago. The concept that finally emerged in 1946 was remarkably like the Apollo lunar module which Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins took to the moon in 1969. The Project Daedalus report has attracted international attention. The 8.1.5. has announced that the Bacon Foundation has made a grant in support of the Daedalus work. (In Greek mythology, Daedalus was the cunning craftsman w’ho wanted to fly from Crete to Italy with his son, Icarus, by means of wings fastened to their shoulders with wax. Icarus flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax, and he fell into the sea. But Daedalus, preserving a fine balance with the elements, reached his destination.).

The team of British scientists involved in Project Daedalus includes specialists in propulsion, communications, navigation, guidance and space science. They are headed by Alan Bond,” a former member of the Rolls Royce rocket team, and physicist Dr Anthony Martin, who began his career at the City University I in London. Science fiction abounds with imaginative schemes for stellar exploration. The solutions range from sending colonies of people in hollowed-out asteroids to deep-freezing astronauts. However, the Project Daedalus team believes that the only viable solution at present is the construction of a robot ship with an intelligence almost comparable to that of man. The “artificial intellect” of the ship would have to ensure its prolonged existence, choose the direction of i flight, select the trend of investigations in unknown surroundings and transmit data [to earth. j Navigating automatically—•with a high degree of machine intelligence for control, housekeeping and self-repair functions —Project Daedalus would steer by measuring the apparent changes in the positions of several of the nearer stars. Although Barnard’s Star is not the nearest solar system to Earth, it was chosen because several giant unseen planets are believed to be circling the central star, a red dwarf. Barnard’s Star is six light years distant from our planet —roughly the equal of 35,820,000 million miles. A modern subsonic jet would take about six and a half million years to fly there, and a conventional chemical rocket about 135.000 years. In order to keep public interest in the programme alive the scientists calculated their starship would have to cover the six light years in a generation—about 40 to 50 years. The only way to do this, on present knowledge, was to design a nuclear pulse fusion engine. This has been the main concern of Project Daedalus. i Energy release Broadly, the idea is to pro-[ pel the ship by a series of I small nuclear explosions. If mission time was calcu-' lated to be 40 years, the boost period would be about nine years with a subsequent coast period of 35 years. The energy release of the vehicle during the boost period would be almost 500 times that of the Saturn 5 moon rocket —the biggest rocket that has yet been flown successfully. Provisional figures released at 8.1.5. meetings in London give an idea of the immense scale of the project. A two-stage starship, weighing more than 52,000 ■ tons, would have to be! assembled in space from sec-1 tions ferried there by huge; cargo rockets. I

The ship itself would probably be nearly 500 metres long and 48 metres wide. When the mission begins, a glowing exhaust plume, hundreds of kilometres long, would trail behind the ship as controlled nuclear “pulses” accelerated the craft out of [the Earth’s orbit. Each pulse produced by the detonation of a small pellet (a few centimetres in diameter, of nuclear fuel would be equivalent to about 90 tons [of T.N.T., and the firing rate would be about 250 times a second. After flying for 50 years, Daedalus should be approaching Barnard’s Star. The central computer would begin throwing off a number of small robot probes that would fly through the target system in different planes and at different times, to make a full inspection. Each probe would report back individually to the mother ship by’ radio. There, the raw data, including television pictures, would be processed ready for transmission to Earth. 1 From the time Daedalus [started sending data home it [would still be another six years before the information i began appearing on our monitor screens. [ Project Daedalus, although technically feasible, is still a long way from fruition. High fuel costs The spaceflight report indicates that the main limitation to the project is the low natural abundance and high cost of helium 3, one of the essential nuclear fuels. There are three possible sources: the atmosphere of Jupiter, the solar wind which streams from the sun, mainly hydrogen but containing a small and potentially usable fraction of helium 3. and by breeding it from nuclear reactions. The scientists concede that this problem “may in fact force the search for alternative propulsion schemes despite the apparent feasibility of the one currently under investigation.” In fact, costs and development problems forced the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to sus >pend a contract it awarded [to General Dynamics Atomic Division, in June, 1963, to investigate the possibilities of manned, planetary exploration extending to 1995 — (so the casualty rate, so far. lis 100 per cent. | The huge cost of a Daedlalus starship could be offset, •however, by the knowledge [that Barnard's Star ts only [the baseline target. I If flight time was extended to about 60 years another 10 stars would come within range of the mother ship's robot probes. With this extended mission capability in mind, some goals' relevant to interstellar missions have been j set out, and a system of I ranking the importance of the nearby stars is under 'preliminary’ study.