Project Icarus was founded, mainly, by Kelvin Long and Richard Obousy. The project was first announced at a conference at the United Kingdom Space Conference, held at
Charterhouse, Surrey on 4 April 2009, when Kelvin Long had organized the first interstellar session. He then approached Richard Obousy about helping to set up the project. A symposium was organized by Kelvin Long and Ian Crawford at the British Interplanetary Society to review "
Daedalus After 30 Years". As well as presentations from Long, Obousy and Crawford, it included presentations from future team members Richard Osborne, Martyn Fogg and Andreas Tziolas. Other future team members in the audience that day included Pat Galea and Rob Swinney. The genesis of the project is described in the original paper as well as a history paper. Project Icarus focused on the technology challenges of interstellar travel. "The required milestones should be defined in order to get to a potential launch of such a mission. This should include a credible design, mission profile, key technological development steps and other aspects as considered appropriate." These goals are to be achieved by technical reports on engineering layout, functionality, physics, operation and other aspects of such an interstellar ship.
2013 Project Icarus design competition In 2013 a design competition internal to Icarus Interstellar was launched. During a final workshop at the
British Interplanetary Society in October 2013 a team from the
WARR student group of the
Technical University of Munich under the leadership of Andreas M. Hein was nominated as the winner. Icarus Firefly, one of the competing designs, was later sufficiently developed to be presented as an article in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
2019 Project review The supervision of the project by Icarus Interstellar ended in 2019, after failing to produce a workable, updated starship design. However, many papers were published as elements of the project, and the state of the art of Interstellar travel was advanced. A review of the project was published in 2020. A number of members moved on to I4IS, the
Initiative for Interstellar Studies or to
Breakthrough Starshot. Project Icarus remains a British Interplanetary Society project, but has seen little activity since 2019. == Former Team members ==