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How Art Can Take Us to the Stars

I distinctly remember the first time that I saw space art as a child. It wasn’t artwork of the moon or planets, nor was it of distant stars and galaxies, or even of people working in Earth orbit. It was Chris Foss’ book, ‘21st Century Foss’ and it still influences the way I think about space today. Foss, a British artist, paints science fiction art of vast starships with vibrant colour and shape cruising through the cosmos. It went far beyond the science fiction of the silver screen and in the vistas that Foss depicted almost anything seemed possible. The world of his paintings was not the realm of real things, but of imaginary things, of things that are not yet but could one day be. It’s that aspect, the role of imagination and of the future, that has shaped my interest in astronomy and in space flight and which has led me today to work for the Institute for Interstellar Studies , which in shorthand we call I4IS. Our goal, to put it succinctly, is to engineer a future where interstellar flight is possible. Not necessarily a future like ‘Star Trek’, where flying to another star seems as routine as taking a drive down to the local supermarket, but a future where it is feasible to reach the nearest stars with flight times of a century or less. It is not going to be an easy task – the technology and resources are currently beyond us, but they are not impossible. The laws of... Read More..