Company History

In May, 1998 while Dr. Fabrizio Pinto, was employed as a Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, he was asked to become involved in the initial phase of a project referred to as the InterStellar Probe Mission (ISP). At the time, Dr. Pinto was a member of JPL's Navigation and Flight Mechanics Section, and was exclusively engaged in delivering required research and development products in the areas of orbit determination and navigation, both before and after launch.

As the name of this new project correctly suggested, however, the approach required would definitely require the team to do a lot of "out of the box" thinking.  The challenge posed by NASA administrators could be summarized by the following simple question: "What would it take to send a space probe to a planet in an extrasolar system?" The historical motivation for this quest, besides the general appeal of "travelling where no-one has gone before," was provided by a number of almost simultaneous discoveries: possible signs of fossil life in Martian rocks recovered in Antarctica, an ever growing number of extrasolar planets around nearby stars, and, last but by no means least, clear support from the American public for the search for any kind of extraterrestrial life, intelligent or not.

Although Dr. Pinto became involved in the project strictly in his capacity of navigator, the experience gave him exposure to the full range of startling technological challenges associated with interstellar travel as they were exposed by the other members of the team. Certainly the central problem of travelling even to a "nearby" star (meaning, for instance, one within a 40 light year distance from the sun) is that of propulsion (in this section only rough orders of magnitude are considered). At the typical speeds of modern spaceprobes (less than 100 kilometers per second) the travel time to cover, say, 100,000 billion kilometers (or approximately 10 light years) is of the order of 100,000 years -- clearly too long for any research scientist to hope to be still alive to publish any results about the mission!

On the other hand, the challenge to develop a propulsive system able to cut such time down to, say, 20 years, is mind boggling as that would require average speeds measured in the tens of thousands of kilometers per second, or 10,000 times faster than today's typical spacecraft. This is the same approximate ratio as that of the escape speed of a spacecraft from the gravitational field of the Earth to that of a small child running at the park.

Needless to say, a large number of other mind boggling problems come with considering this type of travel, including, for instance, avoiding catastrophic collisions with microscopic obstacles at relativistic speeds, endowing the spacecraft with enough artificial intelligence to navigate itself through largely unknown and potentially dangerous volumes of space, and receiving results from it when it is light years away from the Earth. An additional, critical problem to address, is "how to stop" a spacecraft moving at a fraction of the speed of light so that it may achieve its mission and, very importantly, so that it will not hit and obliterate the very worlds it aims to explore. 

A hint of future solutions to some of these problems came while Dr. Pinto was still at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Such was, for instance, the success of the Deep Space One probe, a technology validation mission which tested, among many others, both on-board navigation capabilities and a new revolutionary propulsive system for interplanetary travel. In other words, this mission, in which Dr. Pinto was directly involved as well, was the first in history to test the ability of a spacecraft to "find its way" to its target in the solar system independently of instructions from the Earth, and to reach such target with a main propulsive system that was not based on traditional chemical engines but on electrical propulsion.

However encouraging as these developments might have been, the problem of the unthinkable amount of energy involved in interstellar travel remained the central hurdle. During the several months of Dr. Pinto's involvement with this project, he remembers being absolutely fascinated by the many presentations he listened to and, in time, this inspiration, added to his own experience as an award-winning research physicist, caused him to be unable to limit his thinking to just the navigational problems defined by his assignment at JPL. InterStellar travel became a challenge at a deeper intellectual level than any other previous "in the box" assignment, and he started a personal study of all possible basic physics solutions to the challenges of propulsion associated with this goal.

When one considers the several daring propulsive systems that have been proposed for realistic interstellar travel, it becomes very clear that "traditional" approaches are simply not likely to work. By "traditional" we mean systems that could generate enough energy to cause the expulsion of high pressure propellant at a rate and at a speed sufficient to accelerate a typical space probe to relativistic speeds. One way to achieve this would require, for instance, the production and confinement of as much as a metric ton of antimatter, to be later annihilated with matter to produce the necessary heat. Even if such an amazing technological feat could in fact be accomplished, the wisdom of experimenting near the Earth with enough antimatter to instantly obliterate our biosphere should be seriously questioned.

For a variety of reasons, one is naturally led to explore alternatives that make use of resources already available in the environment of space for the achievement of the goal of interstellar travel. Probably the most famous of such approaches is that of solar sails. In this case, the impulse to accelerate the spacecraft is provided by electromagnetic radiation, for instance, solar light. However, although it is true that solar sails can be accelerated to very high speeds without carrying any fuel, it is still not possible to achieve the necessary speeds by just using solar light. In fact, in order to boost the radiation pressure to the levels needed for even marginally relativistic speeds, one must actually consider beaming incredibly powerful laser light from the Earth onto unbelievably thin solar sails covering an area equal to that of the state of Texas (and we are still left with the problem of stopping the spacecraft at the target)!

During his personal, "after hours" research on this subject, Dr. Pinto started focusing his attention on already published literature concerning Casimir forces. Such forces can be viewed as due to the existence of a background field present everywhere in the universe (even in the total vacuum) which is perturbed when two surfaces are very close to each other. Ultimately, Casimir forces are related to much more familiar concepts in physical chemistry, such as the van der Waals forces between neutral molecules. This led Dr. Pinto to consider a question already asked by others: "Can the vacuum be engineered for space flight applications?"

It does not take long for the interested reader to realize that this is a rather contentious issue to some. The confrontation is fueled because of some suggestions in the published literature that a possibly unlimited amount of energy due to the energy field causing the Casimir force could be extracted thus resolving the energy problems of mankind forever. Needless to say, this is rather alarming to some in light of all that we have been taught about the conservation of energy. However, Dr. Pinto's interest was not strictly related just to the possibility of extracting energy, but to the endless universe of futuristic possibilities that Casimir forces, even in their nonrevolutionary manifestations, appeared to open to the world of technology.

In the months following his personal discovery of the "Casimir force debate," Dr. Pinto became convinced that "yes, it is possible to engineer the vacuum for space flight applications." With the strength of this deep and firm belief behind him, Dr. Pinto decided that his future career would be dedicated to pursuing such studies, obtaining intellectual property, and, eventually providing experimental proof-of-concept of his ideas. In October of 1999, Dr. Pinto left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founded the aptly named InterStellar Technologies Corporation with a little funding from family and friends.

Since then, the company has continued a very successful research and development program which has included a successful round of financing for InterStellar Technologies Corporation. Since its foundation, the potential use of Casimir forces for technological applications has grown from little more than an exotic curiosity to a research subject for major microtechnology companies and NASA alike. At this time, InterStellar Technologies Corporation holds an enviable intellectual property portfolio and is carrying out revolutionary proof-of-concept research projects in its laboratory.

Since research at InterStellar Technologies is diversified to include not only the most hotly debated topic of energy extraction, but also uses of the Casimir force that are evidently predicted by well accepted theories, investment risk is reduced to a much more manageable level. Dr. Pinto is absolutely convinced, today even more than when InterStellar Technologies was founded, that Casimir effects will represent the revolutionary ingredient in tomorrow's cutting edge technology.

A good idea cannot make headways in the world if the vision of its creator is not shared by other visionaries. Throughout its existence, InterStellar Technologies Corporation has attracted the best minds in quite different fields either as investors or as advisors -- often as both. This is a testament to the fact that visionary minds attract one another independently of how their creativity manifests itself. Dr. Pinto believes that the intelligence and vision of those associated with the day-to-day operations of InterStellar Technologies Corporation is what makes this entity a rising star of the high tech world at a time when some are disappointed by high tech investment.

What started as Dr. Pinto's personal quest for a technology that can get humankind to the stars has given birth to a company that promises not only to be extremely profitable but also to remarkably improve life by achieving unprecedented progress in a variety of technological areas. The basic physics of what started as a revolutionary propulsive system is now being considered also as a nanosurgery tool as well as the centerpiece of high speed microactuation applications in the area of, for instance, telecommunications. And, as always from the first day of its operations, InterStellar Technologies Corporation is fully committed to the exploitation of Casimir effects to energy production issues, both in the traditional sense of energy transfer, and, if confirmed by experiments, in the revolutionary sense of vacuum energy extraction. 

InterStellar Technologies Corporation is as young as the first five seconds of the Wright Brothers' first flight, the first five minutes of Charles Lindberg's transatlantic leap, and the first five hours of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Its best is still ahead and it is poised to change the world into one that is ready to travel to the stars.