Titusville-Based Space Initiatives Selected By NASA To Study Potential Interstellar Mission

It sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie: a space mission to visit another star to find out if life or the potential of it exists there.

While such a mission is many years away from reality, a Titusville-based company has been selected by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Innovations Concepts award to study the potential of building a system of micro-probes powered by lasers being sent to the closest star system to Earth, Proxima Centauri.

Space Initiatives, Inc. recently applied for and received a grant by NASA to gather more understanding of a novel solution: they are proposing to send a set of un-crewed probes to the Alpha Centauri system, about 4.2465 light-years from the Earth. One light year is approximately 5.88 trillion miles — quite a long way.

I asked Space Initiatives for more information about their grant, and Chief Scientist Marshall Eubanks told us that “we won a Phase 1 NIAC, and a Phase 1 NIAC is a 9 month contract to pay for a study of our proposed solution. Our next steps will thus focus on setting up a software package to simulate the behavior of swarms of tiny spacecraft in space, both in general, and specifically for Proxima Centauri missions.

Eubanks is an MIT-educated scientist who has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory. He has an asteroid named for him (Asteroid 6696) and has worked on asteroid prospecting among other things in a distinguished career. He is a co-founder of Space Initiatives.

How Far Away Is The Alpha Centauri System?

Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, Luna (the moon), is a mere hop across the street in comparison to our nearest star. On average, Luna is about 238,900 miles from the Earth, or about 1.3 light seconds. Sol, our sun, is about 499 light-seconds away, meaning it takes sunlight about 8.32 minutes to travel from Sol to the Earth. Those distances are relatively trivial compared to Proxima Centauri: it’s about 4.2465 light-years away from the Earth.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.Writer Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy

According to MIT Technology Review magazine, it would take 6,300 years to travel to the Alpha Centauri system (where Proxima Centauri is located) using current technology. By comparison, the farthest space probe humanity has launched so far is Voyager 1, launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977. Traveling at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, it is in interstellar space, about 15 billion miles from Earth — or about 0.00255 light-years away.

How Would We Get There?

Space Initiatives has a novel idea to change all of that. They think that by the year 2075, it would be possible to send thousands of tiny probes to Proxima b in the Alpha Centauri system that collectively could perform the exploration functions of many of our current space probes and then some.

Instead of powering these probes with traditional rockets or fictional warp drives, they’d be powered to about 20% of the speed of light (0.2c) by a LASER system in our solar system. At that rate, it would take roughly 20 years for the probes to arrive, and, of course, another 4.2465 years to receive their information back here on Earth.

Is such a mission possible?

According to Eubanks, “[It] depends on the development of technology, and in particular in the development of laser beaming. I think that the first launches of laser beamed missions could happen in the early 2030s, and the first launch towards to Proxima Centauri and other nearby stars by the end of that decade.”

Their study for NIAC will give further understanding of what is needed to make such a mission a reality.

In Science Fiction

Well-read science fiction fans may recognize the idea of sending pico-probes to the Alpha Centauri system. Physicist and writer Brandon Q. Morris uses it as a central plot device in “Proxima Trilogy” series. Morris is well-known for writing “hard sci-fi” — a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes scientific accuracy and technical details.

That said, Morris is well-informed on LASER-thrusted pico-probes. I asked him about his thoughts on the basic idea and if there is a real possibility of such a mission happening. He told us, “I see pico spacecraft as the driving force that will allow us to chart our cosmic neighborhood. The tiny probes can be built with today’s technology, and given the trends in miniaturization, a gram of electronics will be as powerful as today’s smartphones in about twenty years already.”

Regarding the LASER system, Morris makes a very interesting point: “The larger problem is the investment in the strong lasers that we will need. They need to be placed outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The far side of the Moon would be ideal also for political reasons (think military use): A giant laser device in Earth orbit might look dangerous to the nations that do not control it. From the far side of the Moon though Earth is always safe.”

We asked Morris to describe the Proxima series for anyone who hasn’t read it, and he said that it centers around “the secret of a dying planet: Two humans and a robot on an involuntary trip to our nearest star neighbour.” It’s fair to say that the stories he tells are that and much more, and moreover, are well worth reading. If you are interested in more information about Brandon Q. Morris and the Proxima trilogy, you can find it here.

Testing

Before heading to our nearest interstellar neighbor, testing would need to be done, probably close to Earth to start, then possibly with missions to neighboring planets. “We think that there is a huge potential for what we call precursor missions,” said Eubanks. “A velocity of “only” 100 miles per second would enable rapid exploration of the entire solar system – we could get to Pluto in only one year!”

Why Go To Proxima b?

According to the Institute of Space Sciences, “Proxima b is a 1.3 Earth mass planet orbiting its star at about 1/20th of the Sun-Earth distance, which places it well within the so-called Habitable (Goldilocks) Zone.” It would be the first exoplanet studied up close by humanity, and would give us much more information about the planet, such as whether or not it supports life or possibly could support life. Along the way, we could observe and gain more understanding of another star system, one that consists of three stars: Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A), Toliman (B) and Proxima Centauri (C).

LASER Propulsion…What’s That?

The idea of LASER propulsion is not a new one, it was first proposed in 2016 by Philip Lubin of the University of California at Santa Barbara in his ground-breaking paper “A Roadmap To Interstellar Flight.”

Space Initiatives takes that idea and adds to it. In their proposal, they suggest using a long “string” of small probes weighing a few grams where an “initial boost is modulated so the tail of the string catches up with the head (“time on target”).” They add that “exploiting drag imparted by the interstellar medium (“velocity on target”) over the 20-year cruise keeps the group together once assembled.”

To turn the string of probes into a useful array Space Initiatives thinks an “initial string 100s to 1000s of AU long dynamically coalesces itself over time into a lens-shaped mesh network [around] 100,000 km across, sufficient to account for ephemeris errors at Proxima, ensuring at least some probes pass close to the target.” In their plan, probes would fly by Proxima b and later return valuable data to scientists back on Earth.

Key to propelling a swarm of pico-probes is a LASER system capable of generating an enormous amount of power. Space Initiatives states in their proposal that “we presuppose availability by mid-century of a laser beamer powerful enough (~100-GW) to boost a few grams to relativistic speed.”

That would likely come in the form of an array of LASERs combined to create the necessary power — something that scientists have already built at the National Ignition Facility in California at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At NIF, the LASER system is used to ignite a fusion reaction, with its peak power being stated as something close to ~500 Terawatts, more than Space Initiatives thinks they would need to propel the pico-probes to the Alpha Centauri system.

NIF’s high-powered LASER system is of short duration, and improvements to the cycling time needed to shorten the cycling time would be necessary for a space-based LASER system powering the probes and send them on their way towards the Alpha Centauri system.

NIF itself is working on those improvements as part of their fusion research, and scientists in universities and other institutions are working on this problem as well. SSI says that they presuppose these LASER systems becoming available — a not unreasonable assumption given that research in this field is already ongoing in multiple nations and that it has been producing results, as we are seeing at NIF and elsewhere.

Materials

High-energy LASER systems have enormous destructive power — enough to fuse atoms at close range — and to make that power useful as a propulsion method, the spacecraft would need to be able to withstand the photons blasting it from the LASER. SSI says that “lasersails robust enough to survive launch, and terrestrial light buckets (~1-sq.km) big enough to catch our optical signals” would be required.

Those materials would need to be light enough to launch via conventional spacecraft, and on top of that, affordable enough to produce en-masse for the number of probes needed for the mission.

Laser sails have already been tested in space, and in 2020, scientists tested a new sail that can automatically center itself on a laser beam for a few minutes. Further development would be needed, of course, but the idea is not new, and using them is more than a theoretical possiblity.

Computers and Command And Control

Every space mission requires command and control, that is, being able to give the spacecraft instructions and to control its activities in space.

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California still issue commands to Voyager 1, for example, in order to command the spacecraft to perform functions that perform science or change the configuration of the spacecraft. As stated earlier, it takes about two days for a message to be sent to Voyager, then another two days to receive acknowledgement back here on Earth.

Those messages must be extremely concise given the distances involved, again, a “mere” 0.00255 light-years away. That’s due to signal loss (attenuation) and other factors, and is best described as a function of the distances involved.

A swarm traveling to the Alpha Centauri system would not enjoy the same luxuries of relatively quick command and control. That implies that the swarm would need to be autonomous, and that requires enough computing power for the system to be able to solve problems and to formulate and take actions on them.

“The probes would have to be entirely autonomous, at a round trip light travel time of 8.5 years!” Eubanks said. ”We view setting up the massively parallel computing required as a major goal of our proposed research.” He added that “as far as the computational needs, the real answer is always “more,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t start with what’s currently available.”

Massively parallel computing is not new, in fact, it is already commercially available at companies like Google (BigQuery), Microsoft (Azure SQL DW), Redshift (Amazon Web Services) and many others. Undoubtedly some specialization and advancement in those technologies would need to be made for an interstellar swarm, and that’s part of what SSI will be studying.

Space Initiative’s Proposal