David Kipping

So you could, you could do something like this for the telescope, but it would be... It's cheaper and easier to go above the atmosphere and just fly out.

I think so.

That's a very challenging thing to do.

And normally when you do adaptive optics, as it's called, you're looking straight up or very close to straight up.

If you look at the horizon, we basically never do astronomical observations on the horizon because you're looking through more atmosphere.

If you go straight up, you're looking at the thinnest portion of atmosphere possible.

But as you go closer and closer towards the horizon, you're increasing what we call the air mass, the amount of air you have to travel through.

So here it's kind of the worst case because you're going through the entire atmosphere in and out again with a telescope.

So you'd need a very impressive adaptive optics system to credit for that.

So yeah, I would say it's probably simpler, at least for proof of principle, just to test it with having some satellite that was at a much wider orbit.

There's a few different ways of doing it, I suppose.

One is, it depends on how fast your ship is.

That's always going to be the determining factor.

If we devised some interstellar propulsion system that could travel a fraction of the speed of light, then we could do it in our lifetimes, which is, I think, what people normally dream of when they think about interstellar propulsion and travel, that you could literally step onto the spacecraft, maybe a few years later you step off on Alpha Centauri B,

you walk around the surface and come back and visit your family.

There would be, of course, a lot of relativistic time dilation as a result of that trip.

you would have aged a lot less than people back on Earth by traveling close to the speed of light for some fraction of time.

The challenge of this, of course, is that we have no such propulsion system that can achieve this.

But do you think it's possible?

Yeah, so before I took on the halo drive, there was an idea, because I think the halo drive is not going to solve this problem.