What was Project Daedalus?
A project to design an interstellar spacecraft – the target star was Barnard’s star, a red dwarf. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/D/Daedalus.
Project Daedalus is the name of an extremely large (54,000 tons) interstellar spacecraft, designed as part of a proof-of-concept exercise. Project Daedalus was also the name of that study, conducted between 1973 and 1978 by the British Interplanetary Society. Project Daedalus continues to feature in discussions of interstellar travel. One of its requirements was that it could only be built using the current or near-future technology of the time. Daedalus was never built of course, and maybe never will be, but it helps set an interesting data point for brainstorming about interstellar travel. The target star of Daedalus was Bernard’s Star, located 5.9 light years away. At the time it was thought to have at least one planet, but the evidence this was based on has since been tossed out. Daedalus was to be unmanned, and require only 50 years to reach the target system. It was expressly designed to make it to its target in less than a human lifetime. At its huge weight and size (190 meters)
I’m midway through reading _Animals In Space: From Research Rockets to the Space Shuttle_ by Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, which is about what you might expect and is proving quite interesting. Also dogs in pressure suits have an inexplicable charm. While discussing high-altitude balloon flights of the 1950s Burgess and Dubbs mention that a proposed name for the “Man High” balloon flight, which brought Joseph Kittinger, David Simons, and Clifton McClure to noteworthy heights … They were going to call it Project Daedalus, but when the name was suggested to their higher-ups in the Air Force they were told that the service already had a highly-classified programme by that name in operation. Simons therefore gave their project a simple but descriptive name — Man High. Casual Google searching can turn up a lot of other Projects Daedalus, not all of them involving interstellar nuclear explosion based projects, but not what the 1950s Air Force project here might be. Has anyone in these
