Overview

A brief guide to the real science of interstellar travel. With known exoplanets now numbering in the thousands and initiatives like 100 Year Starship and Breakthrough Starshot advancing the idea of interstellar travel, the age-old dream of venturing forth into the cosmos and perhaps even colonizing distant worlds may one day become a reality. A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars reveals how. Les Johnson takes you on a thrilling tour of the physics and technologies that may enable us to reach the stars. He discusses the latest exoplanet discoveries, promising interstellar missions on the not-so-distant horizon, and exciting new developments in space propulsion, power, robotics, communications, and more. But interstellar travel will not be easy, and it is not for the faint of heart. Johnson describes the harsh and forbidding expanse of space that awaits us, and he addresses the daunting challenges — both human and technological — that we will need to overcome in order to realize tomorrow’s possibilities. A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars is your passport to the next great frontier of human discovery, providing a rare inside look at the remarkable breakthroughs in science and technology that will help tomorrow’s space travellers chart a course for the stars.

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What will it take to explore a distant star within 100 years? To illuminate the momentousness (and ethics) of sending humans light-years from home, NASA scientist Les Johnson helps us digest mind-boggling numbers-the distance between stars, the energy required to travel that far-while laying out the opportunities and limits of existing technologies. Whether we get there by solar sails or ion thrusters or nuclear bombs, the advances we make in pursuit of interstellar travel will likely also change the way we live on Earth. ---Fionna M. D. Samuels, Scientific American The stars ... are notoriously far away, as the physicist and NASA technologist Les Johnson vividly emphasizes ...The nearest, Proxima Centauri, would take many millennia to reach. Some science-fiction writers, Mr. Johnson explains, have therefore imagined multigenerational worldships .... But what will power their vessels? The author entertainingly describes sci-fi options such as warp drives and hyperspace, as well as potentially feasible ones such as antimatter drives, and definitely possible methods such as ion drives, solar sails and nuclear-pulse propulsion, the last involving dropping a continuous series of nukes out the back of your spacecraft and riding the blast waves. * Wall Street Journal *

"""Winner of the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing, Long-Form Nonfiction Category"" ""A satisfying read.""---Sean Blair, BBC Sky at Night ""You’d be hard pressed to find a better choice than a book covering what it would take to get man to another star system, written by one of the world’s leading scientists actively working to turn science fic­tion into science fact.""---Sean CW Korsgaard, Analog ""In Johnson’s vision, the possibilities are great.""---Ramin Skibba, Wired ""What will it take to explore a distant star within 100 years? To illuminate the momentousness (and ethics) of sending humans light-years from home, NASA scientist Les Johnson helps us digest mind-boggling numbers—the distance between stars, the energy required to travel that far—while laying out the opportunities and limits of existing technologies. Whether we get there by solar sails or ion thrusters or nuclear bombs, the advances we make in pursuit of interstellar travel will likely also change the way we live on Earth.""---Fionna M. D. Samuels, Scientific American ""The stars ... are notoriously far away, as the physicist and NASA technologist Les Johnson vividly emphasizes ...The nearest, Proxima Centauri, would take many millennia to reach. Some science-fiction writers, Mr. Johnson explains, have therefore imagined multigenerational “worldships”.... But what will power their vessels? The author entertainingly describes sci-fi options such as warp drives and hyperspace, as well as potentially feasible ones such as antimatter drives, and definitely possible methods such as ion drives, solar sails and nuclear-pulse propulsion, the last involving dropping a continuous series of nukes out the back of your spacecraft and riding the blast waves."" * Wall Street Journal * ""A sober and careful analysis of the possibility of interstellar travel, written by someone with exactly the right background.""---Robert Connon Smith, The Observatory"

What will it take to explore a distant star within 100 years? To illuminate the momentousness (and ethics) of sending humans light-years from home, NASA scientist Les Johnson helps us digest mind-boggling numbers-the distance between stars, the energy required to travel that far-while laying out the opportunities and limits of existing technologies. Whether we get there by solar sails or ion thrusters or nuclear bombs, the advances we make in pursuit of interstellar travel will likely also change the way we live on Earth. ---Fionna M. D. Samuels, Scientific American

Author Information

Les Johnson is a physicist whose many books include Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World; Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel; and The Spacetime War. He researches advanced spacecraft propulsion for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

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