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DRAFT Article 2/19/2018

The Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop (TVIW) is a non-profit space advocacy and educational organization that facilitates interstellar research and exploration by hosting regular symposia, encouraging educational advances, publishing technical and scientific papers, and supporting literature and culture, all in the service of enhancing public attitudes and dialogue toward interstellar exploration. TVIW assists in building a technological, philosophical, and economic infrastructure that advances the goal of establishing outposts throughout the Solar System and, finally, achieving a pathway to the stars.

TVIW sponsors symposia, awards scholarships , and provides opportunities for researchers to present and publish their work.

History
TVIW arose from collaborations on Interstellar topics that lead to several proposals and papers about radio astronomy, insolation control for climate stabilization , and off-world colony development. The collaborators became Directors of TVIW when the organization incorporated in Tennessee in 2014 and registered as a 501(c)(3) organization.

Growth
Although the original TVIW concept was explicitly intended to be regional (viz., the American Southeast), it is now, in fact, an internationally recognized event, with major speakers and attendees drawn from the worldwide science and engineering community. International participation is growing with participation and support of the British Interplanetary Society, the Initiative for Interstellar Studies and the International Space University

Productivity
TVIW Symposia are opportunities for relaxed sharing of ideas in directions that stimulate and encourage Interstellar exploration in areas including propulsion, communications, and research. Five well-attended TVIW Symposia have been held: The TVIW 2017 Symposium was presented in partnership with Starship Century and Tau Zero Foundation.

These Symposia, which include seminars, discussion-oriented Sagan Seminars , and public lectures , have been reviewed in some detail in Centauri-Dreams , the news forum of the Tau Zero Foundation. Areas of emphasis have included worldship considerations, the Kepler planetary search, SETI,  probable human evolution paths , wormholes and exotic propulsion , long-duration space exploration missions  , Breakthrough Starshot, gravitational lensing , and science fiction writing

Presentations have been archived in 63 video recordings on YouTube:The TVIW Channel, on the TVIW Internet site, and in symposium Proceedings. Written versions of these presentations are frequently published in the open literature. For example, some of the 2013 papers were published in the a special proceedings issues of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. These include the following examples from the 2013 TVIW Symposium: The following examples are taken from the special proceedings issue of the 2014 TVIW Symposium, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society: In association with the symposia, TVIW has presented several graduate and undergraduate scholarships.
 * Slow Boat to Centauri: A Millennial Journey Exploiting Resources Along the Way
 * Sorry, We Didn’t Mean to Break Your Culture
 * Colonizing the Plutoids: The Key to Human Expansion into the Galaxy
 * High Temperature Nanocomposites For Nuclear Thermal Propulsion and In-Space Fabrication by Hyperbaric Pressure Laser Chemical Vapor        Deposition
 * Interstellar Travel without ‘Magic’
 * Dyson Dots & Geoengineering: The Killer App Ad Astra
 * Space Radiation and the Brain
 * Space 2100: A Shared Visioning Exercise for the Future Space Economy
 * Starfleet Deferred: Project Orion in the 1962 Air Force Space Program
 * An Interstellar Sail Before 2020?