A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars

“Winner of the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing, Long-Form Nonfiction Category”“Winner of the Basic Sciences Book Award, International Academy of Astronautics”“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

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 serves as principal investigator for NASA’s first interplanetary solar sail space missions, Near-Earth Asteroid Scout and Solar Cruiser, and lives in Madison, Alabama.