Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise In 20 Years

Nancy_A writes "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise. The ship would be based on current technology, and would take about 20 years to construct, at a cost of roughly $1 trillion. 'We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let's do it,' writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE-Dan."

Comments

There's no starship with just an ion drive

[Barbara, not Barbie]

An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.

The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.

"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[Anonymous Coward]

We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35. We are insanely rich, and we have a ton of money to waste on stuff like this.

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[Anonymous Coward]

at a cost of roughly $1 trillion

So a fraction of what we spend on the military finding new ways to blow things up or on wall street bailing out incompetent bankers, then?

We definitely have our priorities don't we?

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[CrackedButter]

Doesn't the value depend on what we put in the hole? It would be valuable if we could put all the world's corrupt politicians and lawyers in the hole as opposed to say Jennifer Anniston.

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineer designs starship in spare time. Here's another man who needs to get laid...

I oppose your anti-intellectualism. Being intelligent and doing creative work is not an indicator that something is wrong. Getting laid is not the most important thing in the world. Curing diseases, improving agriculture, materials science, space exploration, information technology and other worthy pursuits are done - traditionally - without a requirement of having sex.

I know women that only fuck tall guys, sports stars, or cops. If women would make a rule to only fuck smart guys, maybe there would be less neanderthal bravado. I would expect this sort of attitude from Reddit or 4chan - but slashdot? Thats no bueno.

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[Dcnjoe60]

at a cost of roughly $1 trillion

So a fraction of what we spend on the military finding new ways to blow things up or on wall street bailing out incompetent bankers, then?

Given the choice of blowing it on a Bernie Madoff or Goldman Sachs/Lehman Bros., I vote we build a starship. I'll clean the Jeffries Tubes.

To !@#$ with Earth!

Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.

Re:There's no starship with just an ion drive

[JimCanuck]

I suspect that if we want starships all we have to do is find a way of not putting enormous amounts of money into fighting and making money and just use it to develop the required technologies. I suspect that if the worldwide military budget and manpower were devoted to the human species for just one year the we'd see similar leaps in technology as the 1940-1970 period. Engineering is easy, people are difficult.

I suspect that if we allowed the Military to R&D anything the hell they wanted WITHOUT political interference and gave them the budgets they had in the 1940-1970 time frame, as compared to both the Federal Spending, and GDP of each country, you'd find technology would progress just as fast.

As far back as the creation of a mass producible silicon transistor, the DoD funded that effort by Shockley to the tune of 15 million dollars (currently would have been 150 million dollars due to inflation of the last 60 years) to get the transistor that was built out of germanium into silicon so that it would be capable of being used in the guidance computers of missiles. You know the same simple technology that without it, we wouldn't be having this discussion on this website today.

Imagine the military throwing 150 million dollars to create the transistor today, people would go ape shit crazy and call it a total waste of money, the members of Congress would try to make sure that the money was spent in their interests regardless if their locations was not ideal, due to manpower knowledge or otherwise. And in the end the transistor would be another wasted experiment to the tune of a few times the initial 150 million outlay.

World War 2 and the mass mobilization for war, and then the mobilization to dominate in a MAD situation with nuclear weapons is what drove the progress we had then in the first place, not picking roses in the garden and playing nice with each other.

If only people were taught history, perhaps we would not have these kinds of discussions.

Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[sphealey]

There is no doubt that in a situation of species-threatening emergency that mankind has, today, the technology to construct a quite large object in earth orbit and give it enough engine power to move through the solar system (Orion drive or whatever). The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. So until a 10,000x better surface-to-orbit launch technology comes along this ain't gonna happen.

sPh

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[LordNimon]

So why spend 20 years and 1 trillion dollars building a ship to explore the solar system?

Because it's better than spending a trillion dollars to kill brown people with oil.

"We have the technological reach . . ."

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Technological reach is never the problem. Political reach is.

gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[RichMan]

If the ship accelerates under constant acceleration per the description then at the front side of the saucer those on the gravity wheel will feel
1G - A
and those on the back side of the saucer will fell
1G + A

So every loop around the gravity wheel you go through 2A of gravity variance As the +A thrust vector rotates from your feet to head and side to side of you.

Sea-sickness prevails.

It might have a lot of "detail" but an error this glaring just seems that they have missed a whole lot of other stuff.

Ships have to have a purpose

[Dzimas]

Columbus didn't sail three Caravels across the Atlantic "just because." The one thing missing in the history of space exploration has been a solid reason to do it. So far, it's been a somewhat aimless pissing match between superpowers -- let's put people on the moon with golf clubs, or float around the planet in a pressurized tin can for 6 months. Whoopee. Things get far more interesting for tribes of bald monkeys when there's a concrete reward involved - mining rights, vast wealth, land, military superiority and so on. Sadly, the whole "space" thing is going to be a bit of a farce until there's profit of some kind to be had. *Then* it gets interesting. And not necessarily in a good way.

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