Café Scientifique / Science Cafe — Orlando

Traveling to the next starsystem is an enormous undertaking. The social and engineering problems that are still unsolved stretch credulity and imagination.

DARPA seeded a study, “100 Year Starship”, of how to make long-distance space travel feasible. A serious attempt at having thinkers solve an actual journey’s problems will have unimaginable benefits as side-effects. More interestingly, an analysis of the effort could help discover how organizations can adapt to change and still maintain focus and momentum for many generations, which both is useful in-flight, and in solving big problems on politically-fickle Earth.

Our speaker, Dr. Handberg, a speaker and attendee of the October 2011, “100 Year Starship” conference will summarize the event and give his estimation of the problems he finds interesting.

Dr. Roger Handberg, professor and chair of the Political Science Department, specializes in space policy, national security policy, and judicial politics. He also teaches courses dealing with government policies in science and technology, economic and business policy, and American security policy, particularly military space policy and ballistic missile defense.

Handberg has worked at UCF since 1972. He has published nine books and more than 156 articles and book chapters plus presented over 125 papers. His recent books include “Chinese Space Policy: A Study in Domestic and International Politics”, “International Space Commerce: Building from Scratch” and “Reinventing NASA and the Quest for Outer Space.”