This fall, one lucky organization will be crowned with the responsibility for leading research into interstellar travel over the next hundred years. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the guys behind GPS and the Internet, will hand out $500,000 in seed money to that special organization with the best plan for research come November 11.
11/11/11 is the culmination of a NASA-Darpa plan started last winter, called the 100-year Starship Study. Abstracts, papers, discussions and more will be presented in a public 3-day symposium in Orlando, Florida beginning September 30. The 100-year name comes from Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” published 104 years before the actual moon landing.
“This won’t just be another space technology conference – we’re hoping that ethicists, lawyers, science fiction writers, technologists and others, will participate in the dialog to make sure we’re thinking about all the aspects of interstellar flight,” said the director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, David Neyland.
DARPA has made it clear that they don’t want the baton returned. Once the winner is announced there will be no babysitting, and the winning organization had better be up to the task as they’ll be shouldering responsibility for a century. Neyland explains that the purpose of the 100-year plan isn’t to immediately build a spaceship, as that may take centuries, but to design a business plan for the eventual development of interstellar travel.
Neyland believes that nobody can anticipate what will emerge in 100 years, but the point is to get the ball rolling and the buzz spreading. Relatively speaking, we’re nowhere near the interstellar travel goal. At this point in research, it would take our current beacon of speed, the 38,000 mph traveling Voyager 1, over 70,000 years to reach the nearest star of Alpha Centauri.
The ideas to be examined in this 100-year long research project include: time-distance solutions, biology and space medicine, habitats and environmental science, propaganda plans for building public interest and more. DARPA believes that this research will also lead to many unanticipated consequences which will benefit the DoD, as well as the private and commercial sector.
Via NYTimes
US$500,000 fora “lucky developer” to design Warp Drive, Interstellar travel and the technology to live and survive in space? DARPA, bust open the vault when the Illuminati hides their billions kick that grant up to a US500 billion and I’ll do it in a 50 years!!!!
I agree with the statement made by Johntology, in that we will not “get there” by means of spacecraft. Propulsion strategies are not the answer. I believe the solution here will not be of anything we are currently familiar with in terms of “traveling distances”. Quantum mechanics show us that particles can not only exist in multiple locations at once, but also be in different states, and different times simultaneously. Following to Moore’s Law, quantum mechanics must take hold of technology in order to progress us towards this goal. And while were referencing Moore’s Law, it seems as though it might not take us that long to get there…
$500,000 for a 100 year program? I suppose DARPA figures there are people out there who are capable of designing a starship yet somehow are unable to do simple arithmetic.
Speed. None of it makes any sence until you sort out how to go multiple orders of magnitude faster. Once you have any real progress toward that objective, almost all of the other issues can be solved with enhancements of established technologies. DARPA knows that any and all work on increasing velocity benefits military applications – look at their test last week. Speed allows you to extend your influence – from the rock, to the spear, to the bow and arrow, to musket, to the rifle, to the laser… It’s about extending your “influence” farther faster. It will have great side-benefits. Much of the technology to support this thing I’m typing on grew out of the Apollo program. Just don’t forget- Apollo owed a great deal to the V2.
Anyway – we have to go much much faster – and for the distances it will have to be using a fuel we collect along the way. Nothing we know of today – short of fusion – could we transport enough fuel to power the “engine” – whatever it consists of. The physicists should love the challenge of speed in a vacume. I hope it gathers some interest.
So, why would they do this, rather than create a task force within NASA to handle it? Oh right, because privatizing a 100 year pork siphon sounds like a much better idea.
I actually read on eof the Popular Science Magazine in the year c1977-1979, because my aunt had it in storage. IT talkes about different design plans for a livable ship and its functions to make it work. This had been in a plan a long time ago but our technology is still not viable even today.
I can only support this if they mean Jefferson Starship.
I always have dreamt and fantasized building a “universal” ship that will travel across the galaxies.. That half a million is just a start for a project. Researchers must identify the structural material that can be uses, environmental controls, choosing the involved technical teams, assigning architectural designs of the internal/external layers, information/computer relational engineering and more…. I wish I would be a part of it as long as politics will not be involved…. A ship’s costs that can support 600 people can increase 4x every year to maintain and continue the project. LIke I said I really thought about this for a long time.
Yeah, I’ve sketched plans for manned and unmanned missions.
It sounds like a huge project, and DARPA is asking for a lot, and all for just $500 a year!
Well said! I just hope the winner is better at math than you. For humanity’s sake.
Epic…according to those calculations it should only take 7 years (give or take some zeros) to reach Alpha Centauri
Another Mike who did not read the article properly. It’s 500k period, and not for a year.
I suspect that it would take closer to $500 million on a 10 year project, renewable ONLY if results are found to be promising.. Is it our government that is going to fund this project? They don’t have a pot to pzzz in.
Give me a break.
Why don’t we just send messages out in space irritating any life form out there, then they’ll come here, we’ll beat them up, take their technology, and that will be the end of it.
I think the space-distance problem is the only one to work on. If we haven’t figured out how to compress space and time then a spacecraft serves no practical purpose. And if do learn to manipulate the dimensions then a spacecraft becomes superfluous.
I agree to at least some extent. They still must try if for no other reason than to learn. Otherwise we might never even learn how to do the things you suggest must be done first.
I think they’ll come up with something useful. Even robotically scouted missions would be better than just sitting around here looking from afar.