Engineers Dream of Practical Star Flight

Abstract

Why settle for poking through the clutter of the solar system when you can break out into interstellar space? That was the mood last week at a workshop on Robotic Interstellar Exploration in the Next Century, held at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and sponsored by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Engineers took the opportunity to engage in some uninhibited thinking about practical—or, at least, plausible—ways to propel, control, and communicate with an interstellar probe.