Let’s face it, we’re not going anywhere, at least not anytime soon. Anyone who grew up on a diet of science fiction—often Star Trek or Star Wars of one generation or another—has at some point felt the longing for actual, real-world interstellar travel. Then come the hard doses of adult reality.
We have no remotely plausible technology that could transport humans to planets around other stars. We don’t even the technology to send a tiny robotic spacecraft to another star system in a timely manner. (People are thinking about it, but even the proof-of-concept experiments have not yet begun.) Hell, with COVID-19 still raging, many of us are barely making it out of our homes.
Richard Linares, the co-director of the Space Systems Lab, has an idea that could make our science-fiction dreams come true in short order, or at least shorter order. We can’t travel to the stars, he acknowledges, but the stars are already coming to us; all we have to do is find a way to catch them as they pass. And he thinks he has a way to do that, using a new kind of hover-and-attack spacecraft that he calls a Dynamic Orbital Slingshot.
It’s a pretty far out concept, but NASA sees the promise in it: The agency’s NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program just gave Linares and his collaborators a “Phase I” grant to explore its feasibility for a real space mission.
Some of the inspiration for the Dynamic Orbital Slingshot came from the mysterious, comet-like object known as ‘Oumuamua, which swung past the Sun in the fall of 2017. Its orbital trajectory flagged it as an interstellar object, originating far beyond our solar system. Astronomers had long speculated that comets might escape from other planetary systems and pass through our own, but this was the first concrete proof.
For the first time, it was clear that interstellar visitors (of the inanimate kind) sometimes pass close to Earth. What made the discovery of ‘Oumuamua especially exciting is that it was followed very shortly by the sighting of a second interstellar visitor, Comet Borisov, last August. One object might be a fluke. Spotting two interstellar comets in such rapid succession means that they must be extremely common; we just weren’t able to detect them before.
