A project that I've heard a bit more about is Project Daedalus. This was a plan developed by Alan Bond et al in the 1970's to send an unmanned probe to Barnard's star within about a 50 year time period - using existing or readily obtainable technology. It's a pretty intriguiing project. Here are a couple links if you're interested: http://www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/Daedalus.htm http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/html/warp/ideaknow.htm The last link mentions Project Orion, Daedalus and some other interesting ideas.

-----Original Message----- From: Patrick Wiggins [mailto:paw@trilobyte.net] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 11:14 PM To: utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Re: Project Morpheus

cyanics@xmission.com wrote:

...

Does anyone know anything about a "project morpheus"?

Oddly enough, this was on Space Daily today:

The Case For Orion

"Orion" was the project name of a spacecraft design study so absurd that it stood absolutely no chance of success from the very outset. The drive mechanism was to be an atomic bomb machine gun. Ridiculous as the idea seems it was still given a shoestring budget and a team of top scientists to work on it. The results of that research which ended about two generations ago are still largely classified, but what is known raises some startling questions.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html

Patrick

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