Feoktistov's Starship
The pioneering cosmonaut who dreamed of interstellar flight.
- By Tony Reichhardt
- AirSpaceMag.com, December 18, 2009
Image from the files of Peter Gorin
A few Saturdays ago, I spent the afternoon tossing out old papers, trying to clear space in my home office. Mostly it was manuscripts and documents from 20 years back, stuff I should have thrown out long ago. One typewritten paper, yellowed with handwritten notes in the margin, was headed for the trash pile when I happened to look down and notice the name: K.P. Feoktistov.
I’d forgotten about this.
Feoktistov, who by chance died a few days later, was a monumental figure in the history of space exploration. In 1958, at the age of 32, he was put in charge of the engineering team that designed the world’s first spaceship, Vostok. He co-wrote the instruction manual for Yuri Gagarin’s first flight on April 12, 1961, and it was Feoktistov who briefed Gagarin on the day before launch.
The paper I found in my office came from a 1987 conference at the Space Studies Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, where Feoktistov had delivered a talk titled “A Flight to Stars.” I recall going up to him later to introduce myself, and chatting briefly through an interpreter. What I hadn’t remembered is that Feoktistov gave me his copy of the talk, with his notes and corrections, including pronunciation guides written in Russian for several troublesome English words.
The conference had to do with space manufacturing, and most of the speakers were academics or NASA engineers. Feoktistov stood out not only because of who he was—he also was a cosmonaut and a member of the first space crew—but because of what he said that day.
He began with a sobering brief on the problem of interstellar flight. Basically, it’s a lost cause to send physical spaceships to other stars, given the vast distances and the intervening clouds of dust and gas that would pose a fatal hazard to vehicles moving at near-light speeds. “It seems,” he said, “that there is no practical solution to the problem of material bodies transport[ing] at gala[ctic] distances.”
Feoktistov proposed instead that we fax digital versions of ourselves to the stars. “It is possible to imagine a specially designed ‘human being’ whose personality you can separate from his body,” he said. “If an information package that is equal to [the] total content of personality can be rewritten from man’s fields of operative operations and from his memory, this information package could be transmitted through radio line to the designated reception station.”
He calculated the size of the transmitting antenna that would be needed (“more than several kilometers”) and the amount of energy required (100 million kilowatts). In addition to beaming a digital person, we’d also need to send (to some as-yet unknown alien civilization) instructions for building the receiving antenna. While acknowledging that his plan required technological leaps, Feokistov concluded “For this approach to star journey we need decades but not thousands of years and not millions of years.”
Comments (2)
Back in the Sixties, when I was a boy, we knew very little about the Russian space program. Few ugly pictures and a lot of political propaganda. So I was a young fan of American astronauts (and so I'm today). It was natural. Some years ago it happened I could make a few journeys in Russia and in Baikonur (Kazakstan) following some international space programs. In Energia factory's museum in Moskow I've seen both Voskod 1 and Vostok 2 spacecrafts. I crowled inside a Soyuz capsule and met people like cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valentina Tereshkova. Terrific people! They deserve admiration and respect. Speaking about the Voskod 1 spacecraft, she was basically Gagarin's Vostok, designed to carry one cosmonaut seated in the ejection seat. Thanks to the "soft landing" retrorockets, the could delete the ejection seat and put three men inside with no spacesuits. I can say that the capsule is really tiny and I don't know how it could fit three adults. Amazing. My admiration to those guys.
Giancarlo Riolfo
Torino (Italy)
Posted by Giancarlo Riolfo on January 28,2010 | 05:48 PM
I was at the conference (Space Manufacturing 6), and had a very different experience.
My friend Rob and I were sitting with Gerry Webb, a guy from the UK. (We met a young Peter Diamandis and Todd Hawley at that conference, too.) Gerry and a colleague had published some intriguing information about the still-secret Soviet N1 rocket. Gerry was eager to discuss what he had found, knowing that Feoktistov might be hesitant to talk about it.
Nearly all of the presentations at the conference were very practical ones: melting lunar soil to make in-situ power cables, making lunar concrete, etc. Then comes Feoktistov, with the idea that we'll be able to distill our consciousness into transmittable form. Add to that the notion that a ship we've sent centuries earlier will be able to do something with the transmission. Some of us were a little annoyed, since his paper would have been better presented in a different forum.
During the Q&A, Gerry asked some pointed questions about the Soviet Lunar Program. Although he got no answers, he clearly got the attention of Feoktistov's "interpreter", who took photos of us when we pretended to look away from him and down toward the next speaker. (I later learned from my company's security office that it was standard practice to send a KGB agent as an interpreter.)
We briefly met Feoktistov and his interpreter in the lobby of our hotel (The Princeton Inn, as I recall). He spoke pretty good English, which further enhanced the notion that the interpreter was more than he appeared to be.
After all these years, I still remember Feoktistov's notion of transmitting consciousness. I hope a breakthrough in travel makes his concept unnecessary, since my philosophical bent doesn't support the notion that the result of digitizing me will still be _me_.
Posted by Jon on April 10,2012 | 03:40 PM