This is the UPDATED VESRSION of my previous book by the same title. It describes the many astronomical and human-scale issues that make interstellar travel a formidable challenge, even with the right technology for making the actual trip. At a cost of several trillion dollars, interstellar travel will only be undertaken to exoplanets we already know exist thanks to studied by astronomers located on earth. Some of the issues are already known and being addressed such as: What will be our destination? Once we arrive at our destination, what will we do? Will our immune systems be so compromised from the travel that we can never actually visit the surface of a biologically-active planet? Will we be forced to live 'under a dome' and never venture outside without a spacesuit? What will communication with Earth be like with time delays of decadces or even hundreds of years? These and many other questions will be covered as astronomer Sten Odenwald explores the realistic issues and challenges of interstellar. For example, astronomers can detect interstellar dust grains which spaceships traveling at 20% the speed of light will encounter as extreme hazards that cannot be avoided. Massive earth-sized exoplanets have gravities too strong for chemical rockets to return exoplorers to orbit and are likely to be Ocean Worlds. Cosmic rays cannot be effectively shielded for humans on long jourines who will receive large accumulated doses of radiation likely to be lethal.

In addition to describing the challenges of interstellar travel, a list of destinations will be offered of known exoplanets within 15 light years of earth, and detailed discussions of how astronomers are studying their atmospheres using instruments such as the new Webb Space Telescope and powerful ground-based telescopes. The good news is that in the next few decades, we will have cataloged all of the likely interstellar destinations within 100 light years.
About the Author: Dr. Sten Odenwald is an astronomer at the National Institute of Aerospace, and works at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland. He has published over 100 articles on astronomy in his research areas of star formation, the cosmic infrared background, and space weather. He is an award-winning science popularize with nine books published since 1995 along with numerous articles for magazines such as Astronomy and Sky and Telescope. He has also appeared on TV and radio programs discussing the vulnerability of our technology and health to solar storms. His Astronomy Café website, now 20 years old, is one of the oldest privately-funded internet resources in astronomy education. Through his many blogs with the Huffington Post, he continues to present new ideas to the public related to astronomy, space travel, archeology and cancer research.