McGill Interstellar Flight Research Group
@McGill_AdAstra
@McGillU Interstellar Flight Experimental Research Group: Researching the technologies that will make our civilization multi-stellar.
The @IRG_Space 8th Interstellar Symposium: It’s a wrap! What an amazing (and exhausting) week! But we’re not done… #IRG2023
Now on @sciam, from our columnist Phil Plait: The sky is falling—from another star. There's no "Chicken Little" nonsense here, though—this is legit: Some fraction of the meteors that streak thru Earth's skies are from beyond the solar system! scientificamerican.com/article/inters…
Check out the new issue of Astronomy magazine on store shelves and on the web! I'm honored immensely to have my piece on The Five Great Revolutions in Planetary Science that have occurred during my career as the cover article! Thanks @deicherstar and @AstronomyMag!
The preview of 'Laser Propulsion in Space' has an excellent introduction: books.google.co.uk/books?id=9CfcE… It could offers variable 1000-10,000 Isp and good thrust/watt performance, but its strongest advantage is how the heavy generator and spacecraft can be separated by long distances.
For a rapid-transit (45-day) Mars mission study we conducted a few years ago, we examined aerocapture in some detail. The g-load would be...interesting: pulling 8 g for 5 minutes. Harsh, but not significantly worse than a Soyuz during ballistic reentry. ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2201.00244
Phenomenal week last wk at @JHUAPL for a conference reviewing progress made understanding Pluto & all its moons since the 2015 #NASA New Horizons flyby of Pluto, & celebrating the flyby with colleagues & with the mission team. There is no substitute for spacecraft exploration!
Fake NTR program is cancelled.
The dragon is dead. breakingdefense.com/2025/06/darpas… The DRACO nuclear thermal rocket program has been terminated by DARPA. Reasons cited: -SpaceX Starship will deliver so much propellant to LEO that fuel efficiency won't matter -Future nuclear-electric propulsion could be more promising
NEP doesn’t really buy you anything for Mars trips.
A big misconception about nuclear-electric propulsion is that it’d make Mars trips faster than chemical propulsion. It does not. NEP trips would take significantly /longer/. The point is just to try to save money by reducing number of launches. A kludge due to SLS’s high costs.
The dragon is dead. breakingdefense.com/2025/06/darpas… The DRACO nuclear thermal rocket program has been terminated by DARPA. Reasons cited: -SpaceX Starship will deliver so much propellant to LEO that fuel efficiency won't matter -Future nuclear-electric propulsion could be more promising
A big misconception about nuclear-electric propulsion is that it’d make Mars trips faster than chemical propulsion. It does not. NEP trips would take significantly /longer/. The point is just to try to save money by reducing number of launches. A kludge due to SLS’s high costs.
Provocative takedown of “The Three Body Problem”
I've been getting into the Three Body Problem universe and Dark Forest theory. It's unbelievably stupid. Completely unrealistic, bad game theory and silly physics. But people really do seem to take it seriously? It seems like it needs debunking...
Since this thread gained some traction, today we’ll delve a bit further into relativistic space travel.
Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology? Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl, Abraham Loeb arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213
And even with much slower travel, say 25% of c, which we can see ways to do today, Alpha/Proxima Centauri is only 17 years away (probably closer to 25 when you add speeding up and slowing down), which isn't easy, but isn't impossible.
Our group focuses on near-term technologies for the first robotic forays beyond our solar system. But it’s worth addressing the oft-repeated claim: “The speed of light is a hard limit: You can’t travel to the stars in a lifetime, so it won’t happen. [1/9]