G H Stein, "A Program for Star Flight", Analog, October 1973

[PMN1]

In this months Spaceflight, there is an article on Starships of the Future (mostly Daedalus and Icarus) that mentions a suggestion by G H Stein published in Analog, October 1973 called "A Program for Star Flight".

'A full program of exploration was proposed which would utilise a fleet of no less than ten starships which would be launched by the year 1990 at a cost of around $100 billion spread over several decades. This cost estimate was based upon 1970's costs.'


Has anyone know any more about this proposal?

 

[blackstar]

In this months Spaceflight, there is an article on Starships of the Future (mostly Daedalus and Icarus)

I cannot answer your question, but that subject appears to be popular at the moment. The current issue of Analog has a short article about psychological issues affecting crews of potential starships. A recent issue of (I think) Discover has a cover story about starships. And I think that Daedalus is covered in the current issue of Astronomy Now.

It's getting a lot of attention. But it's really only science fiction. When we cannot even keep a project to send humans beyond low Earth orbit alive for a few years, even returning to the Moon or venturing to Mars looks like an impossibility.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Has anyone know any more about this proposal?

This was G.Harry Stein's popularization of the "Enzmann Starship," designed by Robert Duncan Enzmann. I have spoken to Enzmann numerous times about this and have managed to extract virtually no technical information about the design whatsoever. As a starship, it *looks* good, but the math on it just plain doesn't seem to work (the mass of frozen deuterium won't fit in the volume allowed, the manned sections would have to be made virtually from aluminum foil to meet the weight restrictions, the performance of the vehicle based on the roc ket equation doesn't come close to the stated cruising speed, etc). Additionally, I've not been able to get a single fact regarding *where* it was designed and for *whom,* whether it was his own personal concept, or if it was designed at Company X for Government Contract Y.

 

[PMN1]

From sdsds on NasaSpaceflight

http://enzmannstarship.com/Page_2.html

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=24371.0

 

[Clioman]

In the FWIW category, it's interesting that Enzmann used the term "torch ship." Robert Heinlein used that term in connection with his fictional spacecraft capable of "mass conversion" in his 1950 novel, Farmer in the Sky. The term appears again in stories and novels he wrote in 1953, 1956 and 1957. Check out the wiki entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torchship