If stellar exploration is being done by a government entity, the logical approach is to send robotic probes due to the safety and expense issues you mentioned. However, if star travel itself falls into the hands of the private sector, people will go. I wrote about this a while back. (See Ken Layne’s quote. If I could talk Suraya into it, I’d be there, too.)

Karl

What falls into the categpry of sub-orbital? All commercial aviation is “sub-orbital,” but I assume they don’t mean that. I’ve seen a good deal about using sub-orbital for carrying passenegers, but there hasn’t been much on the commercial aspects of hauling cargo that way. Is anybody talking about setting sub-orbital flights up as a shipping business? Talk about your “when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

Stephen

In spite of what I wrote to Kathy, above, I think 5 is the likely answer. We could be sending out miniaturized robotic probes that travel up to 0.1C within a few decades. If you send such a probe to a star 50 light years away, you’ll start getting data back in 550 years. Kind of a long wait. But if you sent it to, say, Alphs Centauri, you’d start getting data in less than 50 years.

I see five broad possibilities for making the trip.

1. Faster than light travel. It appears impossible now. We can hope for a miracle I guess.

2. A huge ship that makes the journey tolerable for humans – perhaps a hollowed-out asteroid. This is also not likely. To have a ship big enough means more mass to move and therefore more fuel needed to move it.

3. Cryonics for humans with robotic maintenance of the ship during the trip. A little more likely, but obviously we have a LONG way to go before cryonics is safe enough that people would submit to it for a trip rather than as a last resort for the dead or dying.

4. Uploaded human intelligence with robotic maintenance of the ship during the trip. At the end of the trip, these uploaded humans could be downloaded into constructed bodies. This method would not require significant resources to house it’s human cargo. A very small ship could potentially transfer many, many people.

5. Forget humans, send robots.

With all these options the ship could potentially serve as an ark for our entire genome simply by carrying DNA information.