New Concept of Interstellar Spaceship


Dear Friends,
     Please read the following article on a new concept of an 
interstellar spaceship. It would cost $20 trillion, our gross 
national product of 20 years, and take 10,000 years or 300 
generations to reach one of the very closest planets on a 
neighboring star system.
     Think about it.
     Of course, you and I are interested in starship design. 
Frankly, here is a realistic one. We could really do it. However.
     It just makes you realize several things:
     (1) How precious and rare our earth is! All other 
conceivable places in the universe are literal hells. How 
homesick we would be after having traveled out for a few 
years on such a journey. And when we got there, what a 
disappointment. Far greater than Columbus felt. The place would 
be far worse than Antarctica. At least there you can breathe the 
frigid air.
     (2) How precious each human being is, and life itself is! 
Since the Big Bang, our constituent stardust traveled for aeons 
before it could collect itself as this earth, and then eventually 
constitute life, and then intelligent life. Yet we look at one 
another, at other human beings, as scum, as vermin. We ignore 
and mistreat and abuse, worse, exterminate one another. If you 
traveled for 10,000 years and then found no one, how much you 
would long for even the vilest wretch on earth.
     (3) How precious our time is! Think about traveling for ten 
thousand years to visit a hoped-for planet, expecting to find 
life, and indeed you found intelligent life, but they persecuted 
you and kicked you off the planet. You were unwelcome there. 
That's what God felt like, working and waiting and yearning for 
umpteen millennia, to finally send a righteous true man or 
woman, and he was crucified, and He had to kick off, and travel 
for two thousand more years. Seventy more generations. It seems 
like we forgot the purpose of the latest journey we set off on 
2,000 years ago. Now the time has come again, and we have 
landed, and what a precious time this is, once in a millennium. 
No. Much rarer. Finally the one and only time has come.
     Read.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Interstellar Spaceship Design
January 18, 1999

By Kenneth Chang
ABCNEWS.com
Length: 1.2 miles. Passenger capacity: 1 million people. Cruising 
speed: 1.3 million mph. Cost: $20 trillion. These are the general 
specifications of an interstellar spaceship drawn up by Steven 
Kilston, a staff consultant at Ball Aerospace & Technologies in 
Boulder, Colorado. Oh, and the launch date? Sometime in the 26th 
century.

While the ideas of Kilston - an undergraduate research student 
of the late Carl Sagan at Harvard University in the mid-1960s - 
are fanciful, they aren't utter fantasy. Kilston manages 
brainstorming efforts at Ball for NASA's proposed Terrestrial 
Planet Finder, a space-based telescope that would be able to 
spot Earth-size planets around nearby stars.

The high-powered telescope won't get off the ground for decades, 
but Kilston recalls, "One of my thoughts was, 'If we find a 
planet, what are we going to do about it?'"

In his spare time, Kilston drew up plans for an interstellar 
spaceship, which he simply calls, "The Project."

Hardly Sleek

It looks like a big, flying, spinning can.

Presenting his ideas at a meeting of the American Astronomical 
Society in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, Kilston says that 
while the project would involve many technological advances, it 
doesn't require any fictional fabrications such as "hyperspace" 
or "warp drive."

Talking with colleagues at Ball and elsewhere, Kilston tried to 
make some reasonable extrapolations of modern-day technology and 
resources. "I realized this wasn't such an impossible task, as 
many of us had been led to believe," he says.

For example, it currently costs $10,000 to send a pound of stuff 
into orbit. He anticipates in a century or so, that cost will drop 
between $1 and $10. Asteroids or the moon could be mined for 
minerals and water.

Not Too Fast, Either

One important choice: the spaceship would travel at speeds far 
slower than the speed of light. First, accelerating a big object 
to near-light speeds takes a lot of energy. Second, if you run 
into anything while traveling that fast, it would cause a lot of 
damage. Hitting a grain of sand while traveling at 1/10th the 
speed of light is equivalent of blowing up a ton of TNT. "I don't 
want to go near light speed," Kilston says. "I'd bump into things 
too hard." Kilston's proposed 1.3 million mph traveling speed is 
just 1/500th of the speed of light. At 1/500th of the speed of 
light, it would take 500 years to travel one light-year, or 
10,000 years to reach a star 20 light-years away.

One-Way Journey

That's why The Project is so big: a traveling space colony more 
than a spaceship. A journey spanning 300 generations requires a 
stable, vibrant mini-civilization.

Rotating once a minute would simulate gravity approximately equal 
to Earth's. With 10 decks of living quarters, the square footage 
would be twice that of Manhattan.

That averages out to a 30-by-40-foot space for each of the 1 
million inhabitants. The top deck, with its view of the center 
of the spaceship, could include ballparks, concert halls, 
amusement parks.

"You don't want to have a life like in Manhattan," Kilston says. 
"You want to have a better life than that."

But the technological hurdles, Kilston readily admits, aren't 
small. The biggest probably would be the engines. Kilston 
imagines some sort of powerful fusion rockets.

Even at the Project's relatively slow speeds, speeding the 
spaceship up at the beginning of the voyage and slowing it down 
at its destination would consume more than 99.9 percent of its 8 
million tons of hydrogen fuel. Powering the ship and keeping its 
1 million people alive and happy for 10,000 years would take 
only the remaining 0.1 percent.

Time Line of The Project

2000 - People ponder interstellar travel. Basic research, a Mars 
colony lays the foundation.

2100 - A detailed design for an interstellar spaceship is created

2200 - Prototypes of the fusion engines, repair robots and other 
technologies are built and tested.

2300 - The 100 million tons of material necessary are gathered 
and construction begins.

2400 - The completed spaceship takes a century-long test cruise 
through the solar system.

2500 - The Project departs for New Earth, scheduled to arrive 
somewhere around the year 12,500 A.D.

Long-Term Planning

Assembling this behemoth spaceship wouldn't happen overnight. 
The time line Kilston has sketched stretches over five centuries, 
including two centuries for design, one century for construction 
and one century for test driving the spaceship through the solar 
system.

In the fast pace of the modern world, it's hard to conceive 
starting something that one won't finish, but Kilston points to 
other great projects in human history - Egypt's pyramids, 
Europe's cathedrals - that spanned lifetimes. "Some of the large 
cathedrals in Europe took longer than 500 years to build," 
Kilston says. "Even though they knew they and their children and 
their grandchildren would never see them finished, they would 
still be willing to work on these cathedrals, because they 
thought it was valuable."

Just embarking on such a grandiose project could help unify the 
world. "Children get very enthused about it," Kilston says. "If 
we have a project, we have much more teamwork and optimism for 
the future."

Even in science, where researchers stress that progress comes in 
little steps and "breakthrough" is usually hype, it's still 
inspiring to dream the big, distant dreams.

Alien Rights?

Distant technology aside, there are also ethical quandaries about 
expanding to other planets, even if they don't have intelligent 
life on them.

"Do microbes have rights?" says Jill Tarter, senior program 
scientist of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA, who read 
through Steven Kilston's poster about his interstellar spaceship 
at the American Astronomical Society meeting. "Perhaps he hasn't 
given a whole lot of thought about that question, that 
potentially habitable worlds are probably inhabited. Assuming 
there's no intelligent species to speak up for themselves, can 
we simply march in and eradicate that planet's biology and 
substitute ours?

"I'm not sure," she says. "I think that's an ethical discussion."
But she liked reading Kilston's proposal: "I have a lot of 
conflicting thoughts about it, but I'm glad someone has taken a 
look at it."

SUMMARY

An aerospace engineer has sketched ideas for a spaceship to 
carry a million people to another star.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

If an spaceship were leaving tomorrow for a 10,000-year trip to 
colonize another star system, would you go?

Yes, it'd be a worthy adventure, even if I won't get there.

No, I like the planet I'm on.

I'll wait for the Star Trek warp drive.

"One of my thoughts was, 'If we find a planet, what are we going 
to do about it?'" -- Steven Kilston, Ball Aerospace

Copyright 1999 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved. 
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or 
redistributed in any form. Please click here for legal 
restrictions and terms of use applicable to this site. Use of 
this site signifies your agreement to the terms of use.