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Incremental steps to the stars
Kelvin Long
 The 2009 UK Space Conference had an additional session this year, one dedicated
to interstellar flight. Organised by members of the Tau Zero Foundation it was
the first event of its kind. This article introduces the Foundation and some of
the work that it is currently involved with. The Tau Zero Foundation is a
non-profit organization that seeks donations and consists of an international
network of volunteer scientists, engineers, artists, journalists, writers,
entrepreneurs, all dedicated to addressing issues relevant to the problem of
interstellar flight. Currently, the Foundation organizes parallel sessions at
established conferences although the ambition for the future is to organize its
own conference dedicated to various themes relevant to interstellar flight. The
Foundation hopes to fill a gap in academic research that is not currently being
pursued with priority by space agencies, industry, academia or other
professional societies. This is largely because interstellar travel is viewed as
being too far from fruition to garner institutional sponsorship.
The Foundation was only recently formed by its President Marc Millis, who is a
NASA employee during the day and previously headed up the highly successful
Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. This ran between the periods 1996 to
2000 and funded several research proposals that explored the frontiers of
physics, with the purpose of capturing any results and redirecting them back
into space propulsion breakthroughs. A recent publication brings together a
significant amount of state of the art research in breakthrough physics topics,
although a lot of the material wasn’t covered by BPP. This is a first in the
field and is written by Millis and fellow Practitioner Eric Davis, ‘Frontiers of
Propulsion Science’, published by AIAA. Prior to this Millis also co-founded the
volunteer ‘Vision-21’ group within Lewis Research Center which ran between 1990
and 1994.
When BPP closed Millis decided to do something similar in his own spare time and
in collaboration with other researchers. So he created the Tau Zero Foundation.
The name ‘Tau Zero’ was inspired by Poul Anderson’s science fiction novel of the
same name, where ‘Tau’ refers to the Greek letter representing proper time in
relativistic equations and ‘Tau Zero’ refers to the situation when one
approaches light speed and one’s proper time shrinks compared to the surrounding
universe. This was a key feature of the science fiction novel and it is fitting
that the symbolism of real science and technology is being inspired by science
fiction. The Foundations web site shows that already an impressive number of
diverse Practioners have joined this effort, including Karen Anderson - the wife
of Poul Anderson. Other notable Practitioners of the Foundation includes
aerospace engineers Dana Andrews and Robert Frisbee, Physicists Geoffrey Landis
and Martin Tajmar, artist Alexandre Szames and science fiction writer David
Brin; to name a few.
All of the Practioners are working towards the same vision – incremental steps
towards robotic and human exploration of the stars. Hence the Foundation motto
‘Ad Astra incrementis’ – to the stars incrementally or to the stars in steps,
each of which is larger than the one before. The Foundation has long term plans
for when it is fully launched, including supporting students through
scholarships, providing inspirational educational products and giving support
(including financial) to interstellar research and design studies. The key
criteria for selecting research proposals on a competitive basis will be
credibility and academic rigor.
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