Centauri dreams

"Centauri Dreams tells the story of what the key researchers in interstellar exploration are doing, and how they move their projects forward, when most of the relevant science has not been experimentally verified, and most of the engineering is still decades, if not centuries, in the future. The challenges in terms of materials science, navigation, communications, and most of all propulsion are daunting. And by necessity, these challenges push much of the thinking about interstellar missions to the brink of (and sometimes into the realm of) science fiction. Yet the people involved in working…