Reaching for the Stars
As a child, coming from an upbringing of poverty, violence and English council estates opportunities were not even on my horizon. My father for example when he was young had known the Kray twins and worked at one of their clubs with his two brothers. His father, my grandfather, was a bare knuckle fist fighter from Dublin in Ireland and would later join the Irish and British Army. I have a photo of him with the Great Train Robber Buster Edwards. This was my history, and as much as I loved my father I did not want this to define me. We had a difficult relationship whilst he was still alive but I grew to understand him. He once told me he had learned to read and write by studying the graffiti on the underground tunnels of London. Despite his own background he would become an artist, poet, musician and stage performer. My happiest memories of my father as a child was going for walks looking for dinosaur fossils and fishing floats and he would tell me stories. When he passed in 2014, I was with him and he left this world looking like a King.
At some point when I was a teenager, I moved to Northern England to complete my School education. It was tough and I was in fights a lot at School so I just stopped going it was so awful. At age 15 I was instead delivering LPG cylinders in the cold snow of Cheshire, and I could see the Jodrell Bank telescope in the distance but never made it there. I went back to School three months before my exams, but they wouldn’t let me take mathematics or science because my attendance record was so poor. So I left School with no qualifications. But what made me go back to School?
One day, when I was meant to be at School and looking for somewhere to hide away, I walked into a museum and what I saw changed the trajectory of my life. For this museum had an exhibit of Project Apollo and the year was 1989. There was a country, America, that had been given a mission to land a person on the Moon by the end of the decade and it did it. This affected me profoundly and sent me on a trajectory of wanting to work in astronautics after many years getting an education. I wanted to be an astronaut and I called myself “An Englishman pursuing the American dream”. I even sewed myself a NASA badge and placed it onto my shirt and I remember people thinking I was a bit strange. We had a debt collector and she was a nice lady and she went to Florida on vacation with her family. When she came back she bought me back some NASA cards and a brochure and it just really inspired me. The kindness of that lady for doing that. I still have those items. I would also spend days at the local library reading all of their space books.
This was a very powerful vision and absolutely inspiring to me. I would go to the museum every day for several weeks and copy down the newspaper clippings on President Kennedy’s speech. I recall getting travel brochures from the local estate agent on Florida just so I could imagine what it looked like, the place where they launched rockets. I followed American Football and my team was the Miami Dolphins, all just because they were in Florida. I even found a local England team and on Sundays would travel there to watch them play just so I could be around them. I made myself a home-built American football board game. I would go and lay in a field on my own in the middle of the night, in the not the safest area, and just look up at the stars through a pair of binoculars I had obtained. This is where my obsession with spaceflight began. It is no exaggeration to say that I connected to something about that exhibit, something triggered in me that was profound, like it was always meant to find me. After many years of hard work, I did get back to School, through College, University and to earn multiple degrees, although I also got side-tracked working as a scientists for the government for many years in what was at least interesting work. But space kept calling me and I slowly returned to it.
Years later I went to the Kennedy Space Centre with some friends after a conference. We were very tired and had been up for days with hardly any sleep. So we arrived with tired eyes. The first thing that greeted us was an exhibit about President Kennedy, the man who was assassinated. I remember feeling very emotional and so did one of my friends. It was a special moment for both of us. Even today I keep a framed photo of President Kennedy behind his desk, in my own office and it reminds me never to forget the good things he tried to do, and that bad things that prevented him from doing them.
Since then, I am fortunate to say that I have since given a lecture at every NASA centre in the United States and it has been my honour to also receive a VIP tour and NASA has always been very kind to me and an excellent host. Probably one of those highlights was visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and standing next to an exact replica of the Voyager probe. You can see how happy I am in the photo. I also gave a talk to the JPL staff. How strange I must have appeared to them, talking about interstellar flight when they were actually building real spacecraft. Years later, when giving a talk at NASA JSC they were kind enough to present me with an appreciation plaque for my contributions to interstellar studies and that remains the only recognition I ever received. But that is okay.
Yet I have bigger dreams, which sound more like science fiction, of wanting to send spacecraft to other stars. This vision infected me at some point and it has dominated my every waking thought like a dream that will not evaporate. I think about it when I wake up in the morning, throughout the day and when I go to sleep at night. It became an absolute obsession. I recall being in a supermarket doing my shopping, and yet my imagination would take me to a crazy place of seeing and hearing a giant 100 ft engine nozzle being tested on the ground. This would make me smile in my own little world. Whilst other people were carefully picking their groceries, I was seeing the future that may yet come.
My name Kelvin, is celtic, and its meaning is “Passing Ship”, which is interesting for someone that does research on starships. Its also an interesting name for a physicist. In the 2009 film Star Trek I was thrilled to see the USS Kelvin in the first ten minutes, only to see it get blown up, as the baby Captain Kirk was born. In the 2013 sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, again in the first ten minutes, I was thrilled to see the Kelvin Academy, only again to see it get blown up. I’m sure this is just a co-incidence, but this is sort of how how my own journey in interstellar studies has been. To build something only to have it snapped away by disappointment.
Strangely, 2009 is the year that I launched Project Icarus, an initiative to design a fusion powered interstellar probe. We are only just writing up the final papers now and they should all be published in 2025. Plans started the year before that in 2008 when I presented the 5th highlight lecture at the 59th IAC in Glasgow which was arguably my seminal talk. The year before that in 2007 was when I hosted a conference on the Warp Drive in London at the home of the British Interplanetary Society. It got a lot of media attention and it was a lot of fun for those involved. We also participated in a documentary film about the subject. Prior to 2007 I hadn’t done much in spaceflight other than write the occasional small article, mainly due to the restrictions of my day job, so this is the year when I really entered the subject matter. I have never really understood what has so compelled me to push so hard on this subject and just occasionally it feels almost like I am not in control of the direction in which the winds blow my sails. It has been both a blessing and a curse.
Co-incidentally, in 2009 I was diagnosed with a macro prolactinoma. This is an expanded pituitary gland in the head, right in between my two eyes. The normal measure of prolactin in the pituitary gland should be around 300 - 400 micro-units/litre, but mine was measured at over 9,000 micro-units/litre. The Pituitary gland had grown from a 1-2 mm tissue to as large as 14 mm and it was visible on the MRI. Fortunately for me, it was a benign tumour although I would have to take medication to control it thereafter. I asked the doctors what would cause it and they said we don’t really understand the causes of it. Stress may be one factor, although I was not particularly stressed at this time. Although it was diagnosed in 2009 it must have been building in the ~1-2 years prior to that.
It is a strange fact that from this period, circa 2007-2009, I also became so obsessed with the starship and interstellar studies. My friends joked around me that it was typical of me that I would get a medical condition that only served to increase my productivity. Indeed it did and the papers, presentations and emails flew out. My friends jokingly referred to being around me as being exposed to “Kelvin Radiation”, particular for my emails which were prolific. Probably, it was too much for them, and I was quite intense to be around and was not always as sensitive to the intensity it created being around me for others. Highly driven, never taking my foot of the pedal. I became a leader among many, not having had any leadership training prior to this. The audacity to think I could just jump in and lead people on a path towards a vision. But I did, through shear confidence in myself and an instinct that my path was the right one. Yet it was not all plain sailing and we had our moments. I lost good friends during this time too as our visions and personalities clashed. It won’t be a surprise to hear that I still think my vision is the right one to pursue in terms of making a path to the stars. Yet now its just me, with no team and no financing. Such is life.
I like to call myself a child of the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci who in the 15th century had visions of the flight of the birds and designed machines to be flown by humans. How crazy he must have seen to his generation? Yet many of his visions came true centuries later. That is not to say that I in any way equate myself with the brilliance of Leonardo for he was exceptional and he remains my favourite artist. More so, that is how I see the Starship, that to us today it may seem like science fiction, but in the future it will become reality. Those that work towards such a future are Leonardo’s children; metaphorically speaking.
My own adventures in interstellar studies have involved many theoretical projects but also the creation of for-profit and non-profit companies. I have also worked on professional starship projects. This includes the ‘Interstellar Probe’ with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics University, and ‘Project Starshot’ with the Breakthrough Initiatives. This includes a 200 AU Commission 3 study with the International Academy of Astronautics. I have also received grants from US corporations to do starship research. I was also a part of the winning team for the DARPA/NASA 100 Year Starship; although for reasons not articulated never enjoyed the winnings and I stepped away from it shortly after.
My life feels like I have started from zero and I am racing towards infinity. Yet, infinity feels a little closer every day. Although it is the mind that conducts the calculations pertaining to these theoretical studies, it is the heart that has driven me forward in this endeavour. In my quest to reach for the impossible and hopefully bring benefit to our species that is so troubled by its own self-created problems of destruction. I very much object to the current direction of conflict and war between nations and advocate for a more peaceful path among men.
Despite my own gains and losses, triumphs and falls. Despite building companies only to see them collapse, assemble teams only to see them disassemble, to find friends who turn out not to be your friends, to trust only to find disloyalty, to give vast sums of money or vast sums of time only to find it was for nothing. Despite melting into the ashes under the pressures of existence in this world, and at one point wanting to walk away from it all caused by years of depression suffered in silence, despite finding myself standing as an island apart...the stars continue to call me to towards their light...and my journey shortly moves to the next stage. Unfunded and unsupported I may be, but the Starships are coming...and I intend to make sure of it. Watch the Stars!