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Re: starship-design: Go Starwisps




In a message dated 6/27/97 7:23:30 PM, TLG.van.der.Linden@tip.nl (Timothy van
der Linden) wrote:

>Kelly replied:
>
>>>Generally I consider it obvious that starting interstellar manned 
>>>missions must be preceded by a series of robotic flyby/pathfinder 
>>>missions (various scenarios of this sort were posted on this list,
>>>e.g. by me and, just recently, Lee).
>>>And these robotic probes are far easier to design, build and launch 
>>>using even today's technology. In the same time, they constitute
>>>a good exercise in interstellar flight technology,
>>>necessary to be advanced and tested before any attempts 
>>>to actually build and use a manned starship.
>>>Possibly we should switch (at least for some time...)
>>>into design of such robotic probe(s)?
>>
>>I used to agree with this.  But given you can probably gain about the same
>>amount of info via super sized telescopes, and the robots would report back
>>for decades (by then the whole projects likely to be obsolete).  I'm
>>woundering if robot probes aer very usefull?
>
>First of all you'd need rather big telescopes to resolve something like a
>meter. Note that big can also mean two telescopes far apart (big means
>something like 1E10 meters).
>This number doesn't take into account that the telescope has to gather
>enough light to make a visible image. It is likely that the two telescopes
>that are far apart still need to be much bigger than anything we have on
>Earth to give a bright enough image.

How about thousands of scopes over hundreds or thousands of miles?  ;)  If we
can mass produce striped down hubble telescopes.  ( Say simple optics for a
couple million dollars each?  Like clemmintine technology.)  Launch a
thousand scattered over hundreds of thousands of miles of space.


>And there are many things we cannot figure out by light alone, that still
>may be rather important for a mission.
>Although I cannot estimate what would be important, I can give a few
examples:
>Think about the structure of the planets, and materials that can be found
>there. You might be able to do some spectrography to figure out what lies on
>the surface, but not what is just under it.
>If there are organisms, we may like to know just a bit more than the fact
>that they are there. Robots may capture/photograph them.
>Kyle's question about airdensity and composition may be useful too.
>
>Besides that having more detail is useful for the mission, it might spark
>imagination of Earth's population and get some extra money.
>
>Timothy

The photos would spark public interest.  

The geology and stuff would be interesting.  But if the robots got that much
info, why send the people?  ( a major question we never successfully
resolved.)  This mission would cost a fortune, and scientific curiosity never
got funding for a major space program.

Kelly