This is something I've been pondering about. The article is well written but doesn't mention that even mere specs of dust can have catastrophic consequences for spacecraft (literally a spec of a few milligrams). A logical solution is performing high c% travel in vacuous regions of space where the probability of interacting with something is minimal. Albeit this restricts your travel greatly. Another solution, which requires a rather strained reading of relativity, would naturally imply that travelling close to c for massive objects would produce a form of gravitational shield around you (event horizon like) preventing any forward collisions from reaching you.
Author here. I spent 25 years designing satellite systems. At 99% of light speed an meteoroid will hit an interstellar ship with the energy of a nuclear bomb. This article describes GEMAS my approach to protect the ship. Comments and corrections are welcome.
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