The original Daedalus Starship probe.
Guest article by Michel Lamontagne, Robert Swinney and Robert Freeland of Icarus Interstellar.
Last November at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW), Rob Swinney -- a former Royal Air Force squadron leader, engineer, and MSc who's now in charge of Project Icarus -- presented a progress report on the work being done under the project. With a classical baritone British accent lending weight to his words, Swinney reviewed the history of the project, from the inspiration of the original Project Daedalus report by the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in 1978, to the decision in 2009 by a group of BIS and Tau Zero enthusiasts to update the study, to the latest work being done in 2014.
MORE: Sizing Up the Daedalus Interstellar Spacecraft
The original Daedalus study was conceived to address a key aspect of the Fermi paradox: "If intelligent extra-terrestrials exist and interstellar travel is possible, then where are they?" The Daedalus study was intended to determine if it was indeed possible to engineer a realistic starship, using only reasonable extrapolations of existing technologies. The conclusion was a resounding yes, supported by a detailed and remarkably thorough design for an unmanned interstellar flyby probe using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) of pre-manufactured Deuterium-Helium3 (DHe3) pellets. The Daedalus design served as a benchmark for interstellar vessels for the next 30 years.
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