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]

Robotic mission with humans grown near the destination.

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

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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

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

[brunes69]

If you RTFA, there is no goal to reach the next star. The Gen 1 would be an explorer for our solar system alone. The quoted specs say it could reach the moon in 3 days, mars in 90, and be able to visit other planets in reasonable times as well.

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

[msobkow]

"We have the technological reach... so let's do it..."

Apparently this fellow has never heard of this little thing called "priorities".

Like the health care and food issues that face the world, and the tremendous difference that a trillion dollars could make to those problems.

Or investing it in providing actual high speed access to the third world to help them educate themselves so they can crawl OUT of the cesspool of a third-world lifestyle.

Or, or, or. There is a long laundry list of things more important than a ship that serves no purpose other than "build it, and they will come."

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

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that would be "engineer designs sexbot in spare time". Or perhaps a holodeck.

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

[pcardoso]

Those trillion dollars would create a lot of jobs building a thing like this.

Or all those billions going to the moon were wasted and nothing good came out of it?

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Just like all those billions wasted on the F-22, another fighter that is obsoleted by real-world events.

In the meantime, the real action is with cheaper remote-guided probes and missiles and cheaper vehicles such as the choppers that ferried the Seal team that killed bin laden.

The F35 is a total waste of money, and will never have a real mission.

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

[flyingsquid]

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.

Little fact check here. Yes, we are going to spend a trillion dollars on the F-35 over the lifetime of the project. That is, if we're lucky and there aren't additional cost overruns. But no, we do not have tons of money to waste. Right now the U.S. national debt is almost 16 trillion dollars, which comes to about $50,000 for every man, woman, and child. Building this dude's fantasy, assuming it was even doable, would require an additional $3,000 dollars from every person in the country.

Using the F-35 isn't really a very good example. That's like saying, "all the other kids in the school are doing it!" Just because we're wasting insane amounts of money on military toys that aren't necessary and will probably be hopelessly obsolete within 15-20 years doesn't mean that we can and should waste money elsewhere.

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

[phrostie]

I like the idea, but a scaled down version of one of the 4 engine configuration would work better. redundency in case of an engine loss and better directional control.
maybe a Constellation class or Cheyenne class.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the health care and food issues that face the world, and the tremendous difference that a trillion dollars could make to those problems.

Or investing it in providing actual high speed access to the third world to help them educate themselves so they can crawl OUT of the cesspool of a third-world lifestyle.

While all very noble, just once, step back and consider what the outcome will be.
1. Health care: if the people being treated don't have a say in payment two outcomes happen, costs balloon (US system), or rationing is necessary (most universal systems).
2. Food issues: Availability isn't the issue, distribution is. So long as regional dictators can use it as a weapon, that won't be fixed. Are you proposing delivering at the point of a gun?
3. Investing in high speed access. No different than dumping food on countries. Net result is the native industries cannot compete and the investment becomes a welfare program or dies.

Meanwhile, investing in this move tech forward, provides jobs now, and potentially greatly increases available resources that can be exploited. Now, here's the punchline, we won't do it because of lefties like you saying social programs! and righties who hate science in general.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice and all, but there if there is no artificial gravity, no inertial dampeners, nothing to shield from radiation (other than thick walls), then they really don't have an "Enterprise-style" ship at all. They just have a space ship using an ion drive. If you can't tell your helmsman "all stop" (and have him stop the ship's motion relative to some object instantly) - you don't have an Enterprise.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say no purpose. We're going to need a fast ship if we're going to travel to another Earth-like planet and colonize it. And building a slow ship would give us more experience to build a faster ship. Still, you're right, there are other priorities, especially considering how limited our space technology is.

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

[Rogerborg]

He's very careful to call it a "spaceship", not a "starship". The guy is crazy, not canon-ignorant.

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

[MacGyver2210]

Apparently you have never heard of the US government - throwing money at pointless oil-stealing wars by the trillions in the name of 'terror'. Fuck, Minnesota just passed plans to build a new Vikings stadium for a cost of around a billion dollars. What were these 'priorities' you were talking about again?

There is no humanitarian effort that will be lost to this construction project, only corrupt kickbacks, expensive useless fluff, and an unjust 'war'.

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

[chispito]

Hence the statement there is no STARship with just an ion drive. Starships travel between the stars.

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

[turgid]

Like the health care and food issues that face the world

With American-style political dogma and human nature, these issues will never be solved. Never.

They may be mitigated and small adjustments might be made, but they will be with us as long as there is a human race.

America will fall before it solves its health care and poor problem.

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

[Patch86]

More to the point, why on earth would you want to build a spaceship shaped like the Enterprise? It's not a particularly practical design for a spacecraft. It was picked for the show for exactly 3 reasons: 1) it looks like the ship from Forbidden Planet but with enough visual differences to avoid a lawsuit, 2) it looks cool and science-fictiony, 3) it fits in with all the fictional technology that it is fictionally loaded with (warp nacelles, deflector dish, etc). Assuming none of that stuff exists (and it doesn't), then don't make it that shape.

If what you want is a spaceship with ion engines and a rotating section with faux-gravity for pootling around the solar system, the best shape would not look like the Enterprise. If you must model it on something from fiction, the Discovery from 2001 is probably a better bet; but in reality it'll look much more pragmatically like the stuff we're building now.

Making it look like a prop from Star Trek is nothing but a nerdy wet dream.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Everything that could be done with the "Enterprise" is already much more likely to be done with unmanned probes. The "Starship Enterprise" is as much a waste of money as the space shuttle program was a waste because it failed to build on the success of the Saturn series.

The simple fact is that we're now back to begging the Russians to use "outdated" technology to do the job because the shuttles were a pork-barrel program that ended up crippling NASA financially and politically.

The shuttle itself was "defective by design", the seals that led to the Challenger disaster only needed because the SRBs were pork-barrelled out to a location that was far enough away that couldn't ship single-piece SRBs to the launch site, so they had to be built in segments.

Additionally, medding by the DoD led to the requirement that the shuttle be capable of doing near-high-polar-orbit missions, leading to a lowering of cargo capacity (high-polar orbits can't take advantage of the equatorial boost of the earth's spin).

Any trillion-dollar program is going to end up with the same problems. And yet, as the skate-board sized Mars Rovers showed, you can do real, long-term exploration - today - for half a billion for a pair of probes.

NASA's $18 billion could send out a probe a week every week, year-round. When a probe can work for almost a decade ... you do the math.

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

[Teancum]

I don't know.... America is throwing about $20 billion down a rathole call the SLS. If that same money was put toward building something like a 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 in orbit, I would think it would be money better spent. At least in theory the money spent towards the SLS program is supposed to go into space anyway, so why not build a monument to government corruption that everybody can see rather than somebody touring the western desert of Utah?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice and all, but there if there is no artificial gravity,...

The design has artificial gravity, but only in the saucer section.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Log fail. You are comparing "federal income taxes" paid by the rich with general "taxes" paid by everyone.

It's like saying "only rich people eat beluga caviar, therefore only rich people eat." It makes you look like a complete and total idiot when you talk like that.

(In fact, if you go back to the original study that showed that 47% of all households don't pay any federal income tax, you'll discover that many of those households had incomes of over a million dollars a year. I'll repeat that. In the study you're citing, many households that make over a million dollars a year don't pay any federal income taxes at all.)

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

[MagusSlurpy]

The moon in 3 days? So this thing isn't really any faster than 50-year-old Saturn V rockets?

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

[the gnat]

We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35

Right, and if the F-35 program cost us that much, what makes you think this guy's estimate is anywhere close to what it would actually cost to build this ship?

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

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You're reading too many talking points.

The top 1% of earners pay more in tax dollars than the combined bottom 90% of earners.

So what's your definition of "fair share"?

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Robotic mission with humans grown near the destination.

"This space mission brought to you by Soylent Green."

As long as you're the first one to be decanted, "what could possibly go wrong?"

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

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Actually it could be built for a lot less in my opinion. Much of the cost of these things is just lifting stuff up there, but once the technology of the Star Tram is rolled out that cost will be gone. I wouldn't start out building giant spacecraft, more like -> increased orbital presence -> asteroid mining -> orbital refineries and manufacturing -> nice spaceships -> comfy seats spaceships, taking about 30 years to complete the arc.

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

[rainmouse]

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.

At a glance the proposed ship is meant only to tour around the solar system dropping of rovers and probes to the various planets and asteroids.

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

[peragrin]

choppers have lower range, speed,and lower weapon loadouts.

There are multiple different jobs with a multitude different tools to fulfill those jobs.

Thinking one tool can do the job is the same as using a hammer to drive in screws. it might work but not very well.

The F-22 is the cutting edge 2000's tech. The F-15 was cutting edge 70's tech. Would you use a 70's computer to run modern software?

The F-35 is to replace the F-16, F-18, and Harrier jump jets.

The shuttle launched more people into space cheaper than any other design of space craft since and did it just as safely.(the shuttle sits at 1.5% deaths per people launched the same as soyuz)

Also the choppers that ferried the seal team one of them was lost on scene.

reality is complex and you need many different tools.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Spending the same trillion dollars on modernizing agriculture and healthcare around the world would not only "create a lot of jobs" but have an immediate and lasting impact on the quality of life for millions (maybe billions) of people.

Spending the same trillion dollars on some pie-in-the-sky solar system yacht which would absolutely encounter budget overruns is at best an expensive gamble. We might get something good out of it like we got from going to the moon - although that benefit will be highly concentrated among those who need it the least.

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

[ILongForDarkness]

"Scotty engage ... have you done it, are we going ... oh there goes." That said no need for inertial dampers if you are accelerating at 0.001 m/s^2. (probably being optimistic with a ship the size of the enterprise).

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

[hawguy]

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."

Thanks to time-dilation as you approach the speed of light, if you can maintain 1G of acceleration, it doesn't take many generations of people to go to very far-flung places. You can travel 1500 light-years to the Orion Nebula in only 30 years of ship time.. Of course 3000 years would have passed on earth by the time you get there. In just 60 years, you can travel 2 million light years. (which an observer on earth would see as 5 million years)

A 1G ship can also be thought of as a (one-way) time-machine. Step inside the ship for a big circular voyage and when you step out 30 years later, 3000 years will have passed on Earth.

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

[peragrin]

in dollar amounts yes you are correct.

in percentage of income your way off. I am paying a higher tax rate than rommey. Rommey's Secretary is paying a higher tax percentage than he is.

Remember if you earn less than $100,000 a year your spending 95-100% of your annual income. Mit is spending less than 50% of his income.

The more you make the less your spending even if the spend a higher dollar number. By not taxing the 75% of the population which earns less than $100,000 a year and taxing the rest more you will grow your economy as what the "poor" aren't taxed they will spend on stuff which will make the rich richer anyways.

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

[postbigbang]

Since when, has any project like this come in for under budget, adjusted for inflation, ever? People do trades on Wall Street that last for milliseconds. What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment? No one does that these days, because all rewards must be immediate, apparently.

An ion drive isn't even C+. The rate of return on investment is somewhere near what "Voldemort" did for JP Morgan Chase, except 500x as big-- to start.

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

[Americano]

So... a program to design & build small, atmospheric aircraft, which is pretty well-understood tech by this point, will cost "a lot more than a trillion dollars."

And you think we can build a functional "starship" for ONLY a trillion dollars? You're mad.

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

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I don't recommend we do what he's suggesting, especially in that form factor, but it could be done for a lot less is my point. The most likely route to big shiny spaceships is as I outlined above.

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

[S.O.B.]

You'd also need a holodeck, transporter, computer with perfect voice recognition and comprehension, and a universal translator. And an android. And for that matter, a woman with Troi's first-season hairdo.

Really? The hairdo? That's the attribute you're going to focus on?

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

[Americano]

We're going to need a fast ship if we're going to travel to another Earth-like planet and colonize it.

Right - "IF" we're going to do that. And barring significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics (or suspension of the same), we won't. So why build something we'll never need? It's like building a ski lift in the middle of the Sahara: "Man, if it ever snows here, we're gonna have a great ski resort!"

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

[tqk]

An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, [living], dying, to reach the nearest stars.

Count me in, please. No, really!

And it's got to take off with Magic Carpet Ride playing in the background. Zephram, I'll take care of the Econs for you. Just make it go man. Light the damned thing already!

Make it so.

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

[tqk]

Here's another man who needs to get laid...

You say that like it's a bad thing. Chicks like to get laid too, you know?

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

[JWSmythe]

I believe what he's suggesting is an equal percentage rate

If Person A is making $50,000, and he has to pay 30% in taxes, that's $15,000

If Person B is making $50,000,000, he should have to pay at the same percentage rate, or $15,000,000.

Rather, Person B has a percentage rate of 14%, or $7,000,000.

There's more to it though. Through proper investments and tax shelters, the actual amount paid can be closer to the amount that Person A pays. Person B doesn't necessarily get "paid" the full $50M. In the end, Person B may pay less than Person A in taxes, or even receive money back due to losses.

Person B may receive incentives, such as homes, cars, and residential staff paid for entirely by his employer. Vacation travel may be provided free of charge on the company's jet, or as a favor by another company.

There are plenty of off-shore tax havens also. He may make a taxable $200,000 in the US. Shell corporations in a number of countries may receive his reimbursements for services rendered, that were little more than notations on the paperwork.

I'm sure you've heard of CEO's that publicly say that they only make $1/yr. That is a token payment which signifies that they are employees of the company. They don't accept that because they are independently wealthy, nor because the feel they can support themselves with that $1/yr. It sounds good that they only take a $1 salary, but that isn't the only cost to the company. All of their expenses are paid for by the company, partner companies, and various shell companies.

When I first heard of such things, I thought it was a bunch of conspiracy noise. Over the 15 years, I have worked for and with many millionaires, and have carefully observed how it works. One paid out 50% of his income to the IRS, "just to be safe". It avoided various penalties and ensured that there would always be a refund. That was 50% of his taxable income, which was a small fraction of his actual income. The remainder went to various partner companies world wide, for services that were frequently only on the paperwork.

I did work for a company who's CEO and CFO ignored the laws though. They created millions of dollars of imaginary money by floating invoices and payments. They convinced investors to buy in their company that was hugely profitable. On the books, it looked like millions. In reality, the company revenue was in the thousands. Investments made up the rest, and they did very well for themselves. Because they committed so many violations of state and federal law, they were caught. One is looking at months in prison. The other is still in court.

Now back to Person A.. They can't afford to do any of that. They work hard every day to pay their bills and other financial responsibilities. If they fail to pay even a few dollars on their federal taxes, they are penalized heavily. If the IRS decides that a deduction is improper, they will fine heavily. In the 2005 tax year (I believe) I had two cars, and drove a total of approximately 12,000 miles for work. I drove both vehicles equally, and divided the total mileage between them. The deduction was small, but I wanted to be truthful. I did drive two cars. If they compared the odometer reading from when I purchased them, to the current odometer reading, and I claimed I only drove on car, they would see the claim was wrong. In 2009 (I believe), the IRS garnered my wages for $3,000. That was the error they calculated because they denied the deduction for the second car. The error was only a few hundred dollars. The remainder was a penalty. My pay dropped to $300/mo, because the IRS was taking the rest directly from me.

Those who don't have the money, really need it. That now reduced pay rate did not cover my essential costs. Food, shelter, utilities, and fuel to get to work. I had

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

[tqk]

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!

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

[tqk]

I don't recommend we do what he's suggesting, especially in that form factor, but it could be done for a lot less is my point. The most likely route to big shiny spaceships is as I outlined above.

FFS! Didn't you see the movie?!? All we need to do is bolt warp drive onto an ICBM, and wait for the Vulcans to notice!

Geez, slow today or what? :-)

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

[JWSmythe]

Oh, if I hadn't already posted, I'd mod you up.

why on earth would you want to build a spaceship shaped like the Enterprise?

Exactly. The Enterprise was a neat spacecraft for a campy 1960's space cowboy TV show. (sorry, but that's what it was). It wasn't designed by scientists to fulfill a need. It was a prop guy who said "How about this?"

I agree with the idea that we *should* build something. A spacecraft to test and implement new thrust technologies, that can get us around the solar system until we have learned enough about traveling in space to venture farther is definitely the direction we should be headed. A trillion dollar mockup of a TV show prop isn't it. There *are* experts in the field, who *do* know what it would take, and *have* drawn up ideas. They work with places like NASA, ESA, and JAXA. If they've ever drawn up anything that even resembled a ship from Star Trek, it was a joke or a silly idea to say "Hey, look, we could build the Enterprise. Now lets get back to real work."

The only somewhat reasonable idea for building a full scale Enterprise, was the one they were planning for Vegas.

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

[CrackedButter]

A Borg cube would be better.

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

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Here's another man who needs to get laid...

....says the man with the 3 digit ID.

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

[tqk]

If you RTFA ...

Ha! Haha, hahahaha, ...

Good one; just sayin'.

On a serious note, I sincerely wish someone would beam me up.

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

[colinrichardday]

Fuck, Minnesota just passed plans to build a new Vikings stadium for a cost of around a billion dollars. What were these 'priorities' you were talking about again?

I'm guessing FOOTBALL!! (For our non-US readers)

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

[furytrader]

I'm sure glad SOMEONE found out a way to inject politics into this discussion. Where would we be without you? Thanks!

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

[Black.Shuck]

... better directional control.

Really? In case of what, exactly? Klingons on the starboard bow?

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

[multi io]

What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment?

Sounds like another dot-com bubble :-P

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

[Tablizer]

...there is no STARship with just an ion drive. Starships travel between the stars

Perhaps call it a "planet-ship", "rock-ship", or a "uranuship"?

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

[Tablizer]

Building ANYTHING can create a lot of jobs. For example, digging a large hole and then filling it back in.

I can vouch for that at our Dilbertian organization.
   

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

[HiThere]

Sorry, but there *could* be star ships with just an ion drive. It wouldn't be fast, but it could be done.

The only thing it, you need the thing to support a large enough population to maintain a stable gene-pool, and you need the place to be comfortable enough that people are willing to live in it. (Fancy computer games help here a lot. So would various forms of virtual reality.) And maintaining civilization during the "voyage" becomes very important. (You lose it and everybody dies.) It becomes even more important that your leaders not be psychopaths. (We haven't solved that one locally, but perhaps a designed society could. Perhaps.) Etc.

Basically, the people aren't explorers or passengers, they are citizens. Every one of them needs to be a part of the crew, but there also need to be multiple thousands of them. (Not sure what the minimum number for a stable civilization is.) And you can expect that when they reach the next system they won't want to debark and live on a planet. Particularly on one that will need A LOT of terraforming, and still wouldn't be really suitable. When it gets to the goal system, it will probably do some research while building an industrial complex, build two new copies, and head off in at least two new directions. If communications are kept up, then they'll probably report back on what they found, if not, not.

But nothing here says you can't have a starship with an ion drive. Just that it won't be much like Star Trek.

P.S.: What you can't do it without is some efficient source of energy. Matter annihilation for preference, but fusion would probably be good enough. I'm not sure fission would cut the mustard.

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

[Smallpond]

Actually it could be built for a lot less in my opinion. Much of the cost of these things is just lifting stuff up there,

A sufficient quantity of guncotton and the exigent development of a large-bore cannon could resolve this issue post-haste.

-- Jules Verne, 1865

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

[HiThere]

No, it won't look much like what we're building now, and the reason is that rotating habitat. That will be large compared with most of the rest of the ship, unless you are planning to use ion engines to take off from a planet with moderate g-forces.

What we are currently building is largely conditioned by air resistance. That won't have any effect on something that MUST stay out of atmospheres. So while inertial mass needs to be balanced, symmetry isn't needed. Neither is smoothness.

Re: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.

At a glance the proposed ship is meant only to tour around the solar system dropping of rovers and probes to the various planets and asteroids.

Which we can already do far cheaper, and a lot better, than any "Star-shippy" stupidity.

The two Mars Rovers cost $300 million and $200 million (the first one is always more $$$). 8 years later, one of them is STILL working. Take his 1 trillion, divide it by 20 years, and that's 50 billion a year. For 50 billion a year, you could seed the solar system with 2 to 4 rovers a WEEK for the next 20 years. Think of what a couple thousand rovers working simultaneously 10 years from now would mean.

You could even make them somewhat self-supporting financially by letting people pay to control them for a few hours at a time. Telepresence to allow for actually doing stuff like assembling remote stations such as mini rail launchers on the moon ... maybe some lunar solar mining and refining.

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

[madhi19]

Ha! Haha, hahahaha, ...

Good one; just sayin'.

On a serious note, I sincerely wish someone would beam me up.

Why would you wish that? Peoples who use that quotes need to realise that in Star Trek Tech to be teleported one need to first be disintegrated! Something that I always found to be a design flaw should you disintegrate after you materialised the copy not before your even sure that the process worked? That way if there a fuck up the "original" is still well and alive!

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

[Fieryphoenix]

No, an engineer who designs a sexbot has an app for that.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

The fact is that the F22 and F35 have no mission that is "theirs" today. The world has changed. The cold war is over, and a hot war, say, with China, isn't going to be won by either - they can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. How good is a fighter after it's shot it's load?

An upgraded F15 and F18 are good enough, and at $100 million and $66 million a piece, a comparative steal.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You're not talking 1G acceleration - you're talking "so small you wouldn't notice it if you tried".

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

[rossdee]

"there is no goal to reach the next star."

That hardly makes it a "starship" then does it?

A starship implies interstellar travel

Starship Enterprise implies FTL capability. (And some sort of shuttles to land on planets, I don't think "transporters" are going to be practical for a long time.
(And weapons should not be included, sincw any advanced species we meet are almost certainly going to be way ahead in technology...

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

[jo_ham]

Apparently "priorities" like healthcare and food issues have already been ignored.

You'll have to zoom in to see most of the stuff on the chart. And to think, the laughable debate about defunding NPR and education etc to help "balance the budget" because it is wasteful spending. But don't you dare touch that defence spending, it's absolutely essential... because... because terrorism!

http://www.pitchinteractive.com/usbudget/

Now, I'm not saying building a starship is a practical use of a trillion dollars, but there are a lot of things we *could* fund that cost nowhere near a trillion that would have huge benefits to society - like fusion power, or a permanent moon base.

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

[Monchanger]

Fuck, Minnesota just passed plans to build a new Vikings stadium for a cost of around a billion dollars. What were these 'priorities' you were talking about again?

Michele Bachmann has to prove how American she is somehow. What better way than max out the credit card on football?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

An ion drive isn't even C+. The rate of return on investment is somewhere near what "Voldemort" did for JP Morgan Chase, except 500x as big-- to start.

You're right; I heard ion drives are C#. ;)

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

[Roachie]

We are looking for a Captain... interested in the job?

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

[Dcnjoe60]

Hence the statement there is no STARship with just an ion drive. Starships travel between the stars.

But the Ionship Enterprise just doesn't have the right sound to it.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

You're assuming it can only accelerate for a short period. A proper drive system will have acceleration over much longer distances allowing it to reach a significantly higher velocity. The moon is on our doorstep, Mars quite a bit further. It also has to slow down at the other end, mind you!

Space is a lot like ice. Acceleration isn't the big problem. Deceleration is.

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

[MindlessAutomata]

At least he didn't do it in Minecraft.

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

[MindlessAutomata]

What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment? No one does that these days, because all rewards must be immediate, apparently.

It almost sounds like you'd expect people to make an incredibly risky investment that probably won't pay out until they are dead, like someone has a social responsibility to do that or something.

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

[tftp]

Something that I always found to be a design flaw should you disintegrate after you materialised the copy not before your even sure that the process worked? That way if there a fuck up the "original" is still well and alive!

If you do it this way then you will have two copies with diverging identity. The copy at the origin site will have to be, essentially, given a gun and told to shoot himself. Who will agree to that? Disintegration before transport avoids this problem because there is no duplication of consciousness.

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

[rocket rancher]

More to the point, why on earth would you want to build a spaceship shaped like the Enterprise? It's not a particularly practical design for a spacecraft. It was picked for the show for exactly 3 reasons: 1) it looks like the ship from Forbidden Planet but with enough visual differences to avoid a lawsuit, 2) it looks cool and science-fictiony, 3) it fits in with all the fictional technology that it is fictionally loaded with (warp nacelles, deflector dish, etc). Assuming none of that stuff exists (and it doesn't), then don't make it that shape.

If what you want is a spaceship with ion engines and a rotating section with faux-gravity for pootling around the solar system, the best shape would not look like the Enterprise. If you must model it on something from fiction, the Discovery from 2001 is probably a better bet; but in reality it'll look much more pragmatically like the stuff we're building now.

Making it look like a prop from Star Trek is nothing but a nerdy wet dream.

uhhh, slight correction. Your points 1 and 3 did lead to a design that eventually became the Enterprise, but the final design was an accident, because Roddenberry's sense of your point 2 was offended by what the modellers had come up with, as documented in David Gerrold's "The World of Star Trek." In a bucket, the penultimate design was pretty similar to the ship we all know and love, except the saucer section was a globe, and the warp nacelles were below the fuselage, not above it. The camera crew was filming the opening title sequence when Roddenberry walked into the studio and slammed the stage door shut. He was (probably) angry, and loudly demanded who had greenlighted the title sequence shot. He really didn't like the globe version of the Enterprise, having rejected it and several other proposed designs because they just didn't appeal to his sense of spaceship aesthetics. The door slam caused the track that the model was moving on to vibrate, and the Enterprise crashed to the floor. It landed upside down (warp nacelles up) and the globe broke in two pieces. About a 1/4 of the globe remained attached to the model, and the other 3/4 rolled lop-sidedly across the studio. Roddenberry stared at the damaged model for a few moments, and then happily said, "That's it! Shoot it like that!" and left as abruptly as he entered. The modellers replaced the globe with a flat disk made of styrofoam, gluing what they could cannibalize from the damaged globe onto it, and the rest is history...

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

[History's Coming To]

I was re-reading the Slashdot fusion power Q&A recently. The figure quoted to get the first generation of (barely) economically viable fusion reactors online was $80bn. The yearly spend by the US military is currently in the region of $650bn.

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.

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

[gmuslera]

You don't need FTL to go to the closest star. But anyway, don't think that ship would be safe going there unless try to do it at night.

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Never read The Songs of Distant Earth?

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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

I was doing things like this when I was ten or so. Be careful with your suggestions.

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Actually it could be built for a lot less in my opinion. Much of the cost of these things is just lifting stuff up there,

A sufficient quantity of guncotton and the exigent development of a large-bore cannon could resolve this issue post-haste.

-- Jules Verne, 1865

Not gun cotton - heated hydrogen. You need low molecular mass of the expanding gas. But the gun idea is definitely sound.

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.

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

[1s44c]

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?

Exactly. Humanity needs this, it's a no brainer.

Now will humanity actually try and build it or will humanity argue over nonsense instead?

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

[ScentCone]

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

We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.

As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.

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

[Splab]

Well... Look around you, how many of those born did have a say there? A lot of people are basically slaves, making ends meet on minimum wage.

Going through space in a spaceship sounds like a one up on that, even if it means knowing no other life (which might actually be psychologically better?).

Also point of note, having multiple generations in space like that would probably mean whatever being got to the destination would be like no human on earth...

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

[Teancum]

I will defend the Saturn rockets, as designed by Werner Von Braun, as some of the best rockets that any nation could have come up with and were superior to anything ever built before and arguably even since.

For myself, I think it is a crying shame that production on the Saturn rockets didn't continue. I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that for the money dumped on the Space Shuttle program alone, that if the same money had been spent on the Saturn rocket family (Saturn I and Saturn V) America would have sent more astronauts into space, would have built structures far more impressive than the International Space Station (Skylab was about half the volume of the ISS.... and that was sent up in one launch), and we would today have the capability of being able to return to the Moon whenever we felt like it.... and there never would have been a "spaceflight gap" like exists today.

In other words, the whole Space Shuttle program is to me a total waste, where I can't think of a single thing that the Space Shuttle accomplished that the Saturn + Apollo vehicles could not have done except for bringing large object from space down to the Earth. Even that could have been done quite a bit cheaper with a purpose-designed vehicle made to fit on top of the Saturn V vehicle stack and didn't require a whole new launcher to be built. Continued production of the Saturn rocket could have included changes in metallurgy and electronics where I'm sure you would find the AGC replaced by much more modern computers and even an "Apollo" glass cockpit like the Shuttle finally ended up with, but that the changes would have been evolutionary.

The test stand to build the F1 engines is now being used by SpaceX.... to make the Falcon 9 rockets. I'm glad that somebody is using that infrastructure for something positive.

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

[Creepy]

My big problems with this:
1) it is slower than the proposed 39 day VASIMR trip to Mars proposed last year,
2) it is nearly twice as expensive as the Russian nuclear spacecraft
3) the non Saucer and body section parts are for... looks? Site is slashdotted, so I can't tell.
4) The rotational area isn't large enough to provide a consistent 1G, so head and toes will feel different gravities (I did the math on this once [for a spaced based game], and I believe it was around 35-37km/22-23 miles for a 1.8meter/6 foot tall person to feel a fairly consistent 1G - probably not practical for a spaceship). This can cause vertigo.

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's not artificial gravity, that's simulated gravity.

Einstein would beg to differ.

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

[guttentag]

FFS! Didn't you see the movie?!? All we need to do is bolt warp drive onto an ICBM, and wait for the Vulcans to notice!

Geez, slow today or what? :-)

At the rate we're going, the Vulcans' first contact is likely to be with North Korea.

(aboard a passing spaceship, a North Korean missile test is seen)
"Look! There's the signal! Just like the video prophet foretold! Land here!"

(at the North Korean launch site)
"Please help our people! We are destitute and can barely feed ourselves!"
"This must be the place."

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

[sco08y]

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.

Why not Jennifer Anniston? Does being pretty make her oxygen theft any more excusable? And, fair's fair, there are plenty of man-children celebrities who would make acceptable landfill material too.

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

[Creepy]

The US's taxation vs GDP (or here if you want a nice chart is far lower than it should be for a first world country - in fact, it is lower than some third world countries (so no, it isn't just Socialism or Communism). There is no reason the country can't afford to pay its debts, buy spacecraft, and fund Social Security and Medicare (personally I say get rid of 'em, but 49% of US citizens have no private retirement savings, and that 49% would probably slam a 24 pack of Budweiser and go shoot up the white house if those programs end) - we just need to change tax codes to start collecting first world taxation.

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

[stealth_finger]

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.

So they can build their own space ship.

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

[lister king of smeg]

People do trades on Wall Street that last for milliseconds. What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment?

you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

We've had ion drives for ~ half a century - they will never make a good drive for a starship - better to use a light sail or a bussard ramjet.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

(1) We're not ready for the next step, and (2) we are nowhere near the limitations of probes, and (3) we will never go to other stars - it's far cheaper (and more practical) to send data than people.

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

[yndrd1984]

Look around you, how many of those born did have a say there?
All of them. Excepting the profoundly unhealthy, they can always walk to the next town, meet a new person, do something outside, etc.

A lot of people are basically slaves, making ends meet on minimum wage.
I'm embarrassed to be of the same species as someone who could make that repugnant comparison.

Going through space in a spaceship sounds like a one up on that
Only because for you it would be new and exciting. To a person who has never known another life, flipping burgers on Earth and then going to a park or a museum might seem immeasurably better than flipping burgers in space and having nothing new to do afterward, ever.

having multiple generations in space like that would probably mean whatever being got to the destination would be like no human on earth...
Evolution doesn't work that quickly.

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

[JWSmythe]

  What are you rambling about, troll?

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

We could have boosted the whole space station into orbit with 5 Saturn launches. The money spent on the shuttle program would have paid for between 500 and 1960 moon shots. In other words, up to two missions to the moon every week for 18 years.

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

[jedidiah]

That simply would never happen if competent bankers were managing risk in a responsible and professional manner. They are the "adults" in the transaction. They should know better and have more severe negative consequences when things go wrong.

The fact that these bankers never had to be responsible for these loans is why they were made.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

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

We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.

As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.

I do not disagree with you that in poor countries, people in power do not want the poor educated, because they may/will lose control. I'd even venture to say the same thing in the US. As for educating the poor in the US, I don't think it would require any more money than we spend now. It would require less government interference and could be accomplished by turning control back over to local school boards and communities.

Does that mean everybody will get the same educational opportunities, no, probably not. But the government educational equalization programs have proven to be innefective where poor schools did not improve and good schools declined. With local school board control, there is also the risk that in some communities, creationism and the like will be taught. That's a risk I'm willing to take as the vast majority of them would not do that

In those communities that value education, education will be a priority and those communities will grow. Look at most college towns. Businesses like to locate there, they have good standards of living, they have good community life. All of this is not because their is a university or college there, but because the community itself supports education (granted a university or college attracts those who value education).

It just seems odd that a 17 yr old in college doesn't need the government to determine his curriculum but a 17 yr old in high school does. Likewise, somebody can home school their children in most states, without the government getting totally involved (not that I am a big proponent of that) and these home schooled students seem to do quite well academically when they move beyound homeschooling. Maybe education wouldn't cost so much without all of the buracracy that has been added over the last 40 years or so.

Just a thought.

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

[bdabautcb]

Yes but change your frame of reference, and they are the exact same thing.

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

[gmhowell]

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

No. That carries with it the dangerous possibility of him breeding.

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

[History's Coming To]

It's a fair argument in some ways, the modern (OK, near future, hopefully) equivalent would be the choice between building a thousand really big and really efficient fusion reactors worldwide or 500 per country. Yes, we all know the big ones are more efficient, but what the world needs right now (according to the politicians and media, who I suspect may only be of my average intelligence) are jobs, and lots of them. The Apollo project was nowhere near the most high-tech and efficient of operations, even for the time, it was basic, cobbled together and I'd even go so far as to say "soviet" in the approach and methods. The needs of the many...

I don't want the best, or the cheapest, or the shiniest, I just want it to happen.

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

[martin-boundary]

Well, if Jennifer Aniston was in that hole, that scene in episode VI where Boba Fett falls in would take on a whole new meaning...

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

[jjeffries]

That would have been funnier if I had actually bothered to login first...

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

[AmberBlackCat]

They could market it as a military ship. Then the government will have no problem paying Lockheed Martin a trillion tax dollars to build it, even if it never flies.

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

[Svartormr]

The shuttle itself was "defective by design", the seals that led to the Challenger disaster only needed because the SRBs were pork-barrelled out to a location that was far enough away that couldn't ship single-piece SRBs to the launch site, so they had to be built in segments.

The shuttle pushed the envelop of what could be done, but went too far. It required too much inspection to be reused cheaply and should have been phased out in favour of expendable launchers much sooner.

And SRBs that size have to be made in segments. But they should have made with the joins open facing down, like was done in those for the Titan 3, so they couldn't accumulate water. And with so much being cutting edge, engineers' doubts should have been respected for safety's sake. >:(

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

[dkf]

Why not Jennifer Anniston?

Remember, the hole is for corrupt politicians. Wouldn't want to have to leave one of those out in order to put in a minor actress.

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

[Muros]

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.

At the end of the day, government spending amount is almost irrelevant if you balance both the budget and international trade. As long as you are not building up government debt, and don't have a huge trade deficit, then all the money you are spending is merely being recycled through the economy. One of the things that pisses me off about our economic system, although I don't have an easy fix for it, is that it creates a large pool of people who are either unemployed or under-employed. They still need to be fed, clothed, housed, etc. but do not work. George Carlin described the system as having been deliberately set up that way, to have people the rest of us can have pointed out to us to frighten us into working harder so that we don't fall into the same position. It seems an awful waste of talent/manpower, and we could achieve a lot more as a society if we strove to provide worthwhile work for everyone.
Don't ask me how it could be done.

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

[JimCanuck]

Lets see Anonymous Coward, for you to post this the world wide military achievements required to start up the technology and make it viable in the first place include:

Computers, who's Military war efforts during Worlds War 2 and the Cold War funded such projects such as Colossus (UK 1943), ENIAC (US 1946), EDVAC (US 1949), all funded with the sole goal of winning wars.

The silicon transistor, without it NOTHING in your computer would work at all.

Magnetic memory was created with the MIT Whirlwind computer, which was designed for the SAGE system (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment of the US Air Force, aka NORAD and intercepting Soviet Bombers)

The first microprocessor was the MP944, which was created for the US Navy's F-14 fighter planes.

ARPANET, the reason we have a working internet today, was created so the Military and its research stations, and educational (university) partners could communicate more effectively then direct one to one connections people at the time used (aka instead of a telephone based data connection, to what we have now).

The reasons NASA was allowed to do what it did, and spend the money it did to go to the Moon, all of the old probes etc, was political games due to the Cold War, to compete with Russia. The agency's scientific contributions alone at the time were not the goal of the Governments funding, it was a way to try and "beat" the Russians without resorting to Nuclear War.

Shale I continue?

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

[History's Coming To]

Second time today I saw a post that needed a +1 Sad.

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

[JimCanuck]

War is easier to mobilize a economy, and at the end the end of the day, as long as there is no political interference, similar to what happens today in all government agencies not just the Military, stuff can get done as long as you allow it to.

Regardless if we work towards a better mankind, or towards a world with more effective, and better ways to kill people isn't the issue. Either way, the end result is the same, a world with more opportunities and options for everyone over time. The question only then becomes, what would be more effective? A "Department of Technology" funding projects, or the military?

And something tells me no "Department of Technology" spending money would actually benefit us more then the contributions of the Military. Seeing how the research funding is spent around here, without a goal, or purpose, just to "try" something, and then forget about it, simply because there is no interest in the projects. Whereas, the Military, even when the project fails, they learn from it, and do not fund the same type of project twice like government research grant money tends to do. Plus past experience of the last few thousand years, tends to show that Military research and development tends to make a bigger impact on our lives on the long run then civilian research grants.

Would be interesting to figure a dollar figure return on investment though, but that kind of data would be very difficult to compile in any case.

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

[Shadow99_1]

This reminds me so much of the people at companies who say "Why care about the environment? I won't be around to live in it." Sure we can sit on our single rock in the sky and wait for the next climate changing disaster to wipe us out or we could, you know go elsewhere and maybe see what is there.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

And SRBs that size have to be made in segments

Nope - the original spec was single spun body, not segmented. The air force also developed a single spun body version, same as military boosters. NASA - It's all pork all the way down.

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

[Muros]

To be honest, I don't think that has anything to do with it being the military per se. What it IS, is that it is an organisation (the military in this case) with a sustained strategic interest that is longer than a few years. Civilian endeavours come and go, funding is given to pet projects and withdrawn, etc. If something is earmarked by the Pentagon as being in the national interest, it gets done. It is not a success of the military, rather a failure of politics, that this is the case. Anyhow, that is all kind of tangential to my previous assertion that cost should be a factor in spending decisions only after a cost benefit analysis is done. A failure costing $200M that generates $300M in the economy is a success.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here's another man who need to get laid...

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

[Svartormr]

I remember hearing about the Thiokol pork (both originally and when considering what to do after the Challenger loss) but I'd either never read or forgot Aerojet had a monolithic design; thanks for pointing that out. It would have been the superior choice.

Certainly the UTC 5, 6, and 7 segment solid boosters have flown in the 100's on Titan 3C's and later and as far as I know have never had a failure similar to what happened to the Challlenger. However, the Titan stack doesn't have to endure the initial twang that the shuttle stack did (due to the horizontal layout of shuttle + tank + SRB's). That twang makes having a segmented SRB more complex and prone to problems and eventually failures (another reason to go with the monolithic build).

I remember the facing of the join in UTC's SRB's (it faces down) versus Thiokol's (it faces up) coming up during the Challenger investigation. Ice forming in the join on the Thiokol SRB's would have increased the cold-soaking of the segment seals which increased the burn-through on cold launches. Would a downward facing join have saved the Challenger? We don't know. But it makes the approval of the Thiokol design even a worse choice, especially in light of several years experience (Titan 3C with the 5-segment SRB's flew in 1965).

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

[lightknight]

Haha. I agree with this statement, but only if I get to dress in a red ST uniform, and command the ship for its first mission. ;-)

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

[lightknight]

Wait, what is an impulse drive? And yes, this thing is missing a warp drive.

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

[lightknight]

"3) the non Saucer and body section parts are for... looks? Site is slashdotted, so I can't tell." -> 'Tis so we know that it isn't a UFO. What alien would build a craft like this, and why? As it will be easier to identify, that should cut down on the false sightings of real UFOs -> "OMG, dude, there's an alien spacecraft! Look! Look!" "Nah that's just the Enterprise." "You're right, let's go back to playing CS."

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

[jandrese]

It's not even well designed. There is going to be constant drag between the rotating living quarters and the non-rotating engine parts, causing the engine to always be pulled slightly to one side. You could fix this with two sets of counter-rotating living spaces though.

The bigger problem is what to do with the waste heat from the 4.5 Gigawatts(!!!) of nuclear energy powering the thing. Blackbody radiation isn't the most efficient way to dispose of waste heat, but it's the only one that works in space. One Earth nuclear powerplants are built near water sources for this reason, and the plan doesn't appear to have a provision to tether a thing to an icy comet to dump all of the waste heat into it. I don't think this plan is nearly as well considered as the author seems to think.

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

[0111 1110]

Starship Enterprise implies FTL capability.

Right. Because a ship that can travel at 0.95c is too slow to ever make it to Alpha Centauri. Therefore it is not a star ship. Only a ship that is able to violate the laws of physics can truly be called a starship.

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

[youn]

sphere would probably best... but borg cube is definitely better

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

[Penguinisto]

Songs of Distant Earth had hibernation for the last ship to leave Earth, but otherwise yeah, good call.

To expand for the pseudo-geeks out there, the early colony ships would take along cryogenic-frozen sperm and eggs, then would use in-vitro fertilization and artificial wombs to make babies. Robots would do the education and rearing, while other robots began building everything else.

Assuming that the components would remain viable that whole time, and that the machinery held up and did what it was supposed to? Seems like the only feasible way to get people from here to another star system using what we know now, technology-wise.

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

[Penguinisto]

you're missing one ingredient (hint: they're located in ovaries.)

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

[EdIII]

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

Awwwww... That's so sweet and noble.... but does it get us anywhere closer to beaming down to other planets and nailing hot space aliens while simultaneously carrying out foreign policy?

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

[philip.paradis]

You're missing the fact that women donate eggs.

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

[EdIII]

Now will humanity actually try and build it or will humanity argue over nonsense instead?

Uhhh, just what planet do you think this is?

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

[danlock4]

That's what the pattern buffer is for.

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

[Corbets]

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.

Why not Jennifer Anniston? Does being pretty make her oxygen theft any more excusable? And, fair's fair, there are plenty of man-children celebrities who would make acceptable landfill material too.

Oh hell yes!!! Just because you've never exercised your sex drive doesn't mean the rest of us wouldn't like to.

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

[Americano]

Sure we can sit on our single rock in the sky and wait for the next climate changing disaster to wipe us out or we could, you know go elsewhere and maybe see what is there.

Or, we could learn how to adapt to our environment, and stop shitting in the only bed we're ever likely to have, instead of saying, "We'll get these magical starships that will whisk us away to some new home after we've destroyed this one." Because, "Why care about the environment? We can just go live somewhere else," is probably more disingenuous and foolish than saying "It'll be someone else's problem after I'm dead."

Because, you know, we KNOW what's "out there" already - a whole lot of NOTHING. A whole lot of incredibly hostile environment that will kill you in seconds. A whole lot of no air, temperatures that will either freeze you to death in seconds, or burn you to a crisp in seconds, radiation that will cook you more or less alive, a lack of gravity that will reduce your muscles to nothing, and leave your bones so weak they won't hold you upright. We have yet to find a planet that is naturally hospitable to humans, and any such planet we find is likely to be so far away and so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to reach that we either never will reach it, or we will need to find a way to violate rules of physics governing the maximum speeds we're ever likely to be able to achieve.

Spare me the "colonization" and "save the species" arguments. If we spent 10% of the energy and materials required to reach another star right here on earth, spent it on improving the difficult problems of sustainable food growth & distribution, sustainable industry, and research into sustainable energy sources, we'd be infinitely better off, and wouldn't *need* to make up these fantasies about how we're totally going to zip around from star to star in starships someday.

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

[melchoir55]

My big problems with this:

2) it is nearly twice as expensive as the Russian nuclear

Were that it were only twice as expensive. Your link points out the Russian vehicle is 580 mil. The enterprise is priced at a tril. This is roughly 1700 times as expensive. If my math is right.

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

[Boronx]

Yeah, probably.

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

[dadioflex]

People do trades on Wall Street that last for milliseconds. What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment?

you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.

Um, you need to read a history book. At no point did anyone send out explorers for the hell of it. They sent them out to find exploitable resources. And once America was discovered and years later colonized, not a man, woman or child went to the Americas that didn't think they would have a better life because of it. And the vessels they embarked upon had been around for centuries beforehand and were already purposed for a million other uses. For your analogy to work, the pilgrim fathers would have had to bump up against America for the first time aboard the only hovercraft in existence. That did not happen. As far as we know. History is unreliable.

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

[dadioflex]

"I'll clean the Jeffries Tubes." - Do we wonder why there's so much Star Trek slash fiction? Do we?

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

[Reservoir Penguin]

Why should someone be punished with higher taxed percentage for being successful? This is the reason why EU economy is so totally fucked right now. Educated people and enterpreneurs are fleeing that social-democratic hell hole for US. Even linix fled the socialist paradise of Finland, and got US citizenship.

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

[Reservoir Penguin]

I agree we need to start building a long term proof of concept spaceship, something like the ITER project for fusion.

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

[Rennt]

I'm thinking that the engineer knows all this, but he cynically adopted an iconic skin to generate support. The plan being to first get a budget then let practicalities of design take over.

Funnily enough, a sensible design for the suggested configuration would look more like an upsized Corellian transport. I'm surprised he didn't sell the idea as building the Millennium Falcon.

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

[toriver]

Ah, but Obama only deals with the American space program, not e.g. the Chinese, Indian, Russian, etc. It would be a nice feather in the cap of any other nation to build the first ion-drive starship.

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

[bejiitas_wrath]

If you built the gun barrel 20 KM long, so that it extended into the outer atmosphere and it was an electromagnetic railgun, then you could gradually accellerate a craft and pop it out the top and fire a rocket engine to get an extra boost. It could work. The StarTram project could be more promising. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/StarTram

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

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Very impractical, at least for the moment. And I don't think you need a 20 km barrel. For launching a substantial portion of cargo, a much shorted barrel (with correspondingly higher acceleration) would do just fine, since most weight carried into space isn't people. That alone could lead to substantial cost reductions (with the resulting boost for space economy most likely motivating people to build something more ambitious later).

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

[Chrisje]

The African continent doesn't need high speed access to pull itself out of its misery. The African continent needs to find a way to quit being shafted by global corporations and first world governments working in tandem to keep them from developing a decent infrastructure of transportation of food, basic building materials, electricity and health care. To get a more fully developed idea of my argument here, I suggest reading "Bad Samaritans" by Ha Joon Chang of Cambridge. He details quite nicely how the Free Market doctrine of the WTO, IMF and other suchlike organizations are destroying the tariff system that might protect what's left of the markets in non-first-world countries so as to protect Big Business, and thus stifle any upward mobility and innovation that might come from developing nations.

I firmly believe that protection of internal markets, a system of tariffs on import and the national protection of emerging industries using tariff money might do the Africans a wee bit more good than "high speed access", and I am not the only one that agrees with that viewpoint. Nokia, funnily enough, seems to get this. They just introduced the Nokia 103, a very dumb phone which can last up to 10 days on standby and which can be used for speaking 11 hours on a single charge. They market this because they feel quite a few people on the African continent don't even have access to electricity on a regular enough basis to drive a smartphone. And by proxy of that insight, they can't drive a laptop with "high speed access" either.

Another thing that doesn't help are the IP Protection laws that are trying to root out the copying of technology for use in countries that can't afford "the original", and when I say technology I don't just mean content, electronics or physical devices, but also stuff like regular old tools, medicine and lord knows what you can throw at that concept.

As Ha Joon Chang rightfully puts it: Players can only compete on a level playing field if the teams are somewhat balanced. If you have a very disparate and skewed set of players in the world, the only way to deal with that is by having some kind of handicap system in place. In other words, opposite to the free-market and democracy for all doctrines in this world, the playing field simply needs to be kept uneven if a mom and pop shop in Africa ever wants to grow its business in the face of competition from GM, John Deere, Astra Zeneca, Monsanto or IBM, because otherwise these giants will simply wipe out local players in a heartbeat. The analogy is simple. If I can play a round of golf with sticks I managed to buy for 200 USD, I cannot compete about a corporate backed Tiger Woods unless there's a stiff handicap system in place.

So while I feel the OLTP project and all of these people that cry out for high speed access for all Africans are benign have the best of intentions, I also believe they're full of shit and don't know their ass from their elbow. This may sound harsh, but during my 17 years in the IT business I have learned that you never, ever solve anything by attacking random symptoms of a problem rather than finding the root causes and eliminating them.

Once infrastructure, local business and a steady flow of cash are guaranteed, stuff like high speed access to the net will follow. Not the other way around. I don't see how a penniless African could benefit from the ability to read the Wiki on Nuclear Fission or the ability to shop for books on Amazon if he doesn't have food, basic infrastructure or even a bank.

By the way, the previous AC comment was mine. I just migrated to a new Mac, and had forgotten to check if I was logged on to the website at all. Damn. I hate it when stuff like that happens.

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

[u38cg]

Rubbish. Lots of people invest in long-term instruments. They just don't make a noise about it. There is a lot of finance out there for large projects (I agree, probably not this one given the risks) but for realistic stuff, it's not hard. Insurers and pension providers need somewhere to park their cash.

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

[That_Dan_Guy]

It is absolutely stunning that Neal deGrass Tyson hasn't been quoted here yet.

Here is a good 5 minute video by him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o

On Innovation while under file by people like you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJBC5rHxYcA

Tyson testifying in front of Congress:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhc25v0DpJc
Pointing out you didn't have to have speical programs trying to convince students to be scientists and engineers "it was self evident."
"Will reboot America's ability to innovate"
"How much would you pay to launch our economy? ... How much would you pay for the Universe?"

If you can spend more than 5 minutes reading you can read his case for space here:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137277/neil-degrasse-tyson/the-case-for-space

You will have to read through to the end. In this article he only cites one specific cross pollination technology that has saved countless lives of Breast cancer victims. But in other places you can see him citing example after example. Just go down to your local hospital. Check out the MACHINES in the hospital. Which one was made via targeted spending by people with the attitude of "Why spend money up there (or over there in physics) when we could be spending money on health science?" I'll give you a clue: NONE. MRI, Xray machines etc.

Space exploration taps ALL science subjects. They bring everything together.

You ask why should we be spending money up there instead of down here? WE ARE SPENDING MONEY DOWN HERE. How much are we spending "up there?" Do you really know? Most people think it is 5 or 10 cents on every tax dollar. During the space race it was 4 pennies. Today it is less than HALF a penny. Are you really telling me you are unwilling to spend even a penny for the Universe?

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

[CayceeDee]

Some communities. How about the entire state of Tennessee which recently passed laws allowing creationism equal time in all science curriculum's and made it possible to fire teachers if they even mention "gateway sexual activities" in any area. What this country needs is a national curriculum which would apply to every state, city and town whether that town was in California or Tennessee. It also needs national textbooks with the subjects overseen by professionals in the field instead of local school boards deciding that "little Johnny Reb" needs to be told that America is a God Based nation like they did in Texas. The fact that most schools have become nothing more than sports star mills might have something to do with the state of education, too.

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

[JWSmythe]

    Once we can get the governments of the world to cooperate with each other, the world wide resources put into the art of killing each other can be put continuity of the species through expansion to other worlds. Heck, there would be a budget surplus, the guy could see his life size sci-fi model flying around, but it would only be one of a fleet of ships that we'd have going in all directions. It would be a nice sci-fi nerd's space tourist destination, right along with a 2001 Discovery One, and a few monoliths.

    I see nothing wrong with tributes to dreamers. They can't be the primary goal though.

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

[JWSmythe]

    I love these contests. Whip it out, and we'll see who's is bigger.

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

[JimCanuck]

And anything that can be construed as military interest is really an underlying business interest, like the discovery of the Americas, but that was made possible by academic discoveries in timekeeping in Academia that allowed for long-term longitudinal navigation.

You do realize that the discovery and colonization of the Americas, were done a century before the invention of the famed accurate method for longitudinal navigation that John Harrison's marine chronometer in 1737 gave us? My ancestors who colonized Canada in 1604 would have something to say about that.

Also before John Harrison's marine chronometer, in 1737, most methods of keeping longitude were relatively useless for most travel and grossly inaccurate. Which by the way he created and competed in that competition that was funded by the British Parliament for the expressed purpose of the Military after the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707. Yes another military inspired innovation.

So what was your point again? Because I think you don't have a valid one.

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

[Penguinisto]

I missed no such thing. He inferred that nerds only need an artificial womb to make babies. Since said nerds almost always have the sperm available, a female willing to provide the eggs was the missing ingredient.

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

[parityodd]

I don t recall any project like this to coming in over budget either.

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

[postbigbang]

With all due respect, as this is common knowledge, I'll ask you to perform your own research, so as not to embarrass you fully.

Please mod me: Mr Obvious.

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

[dhasenan]

A household with two kids on $100k in a mid-size city in the US...that's not a grand life by any means.

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

[AchilleTalon]

It is even more ridiculous. We can build thousands of probes for that purpose. The human is about useless up there.

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

[kimvette]

Well, the value of the hole itself would be decreased as any compost comprised of politicians would most certainly be toxic, but the return on investment would certainly be immense, with the economy likely reaping the benefits almost immediately, along with the elimination of war. Well, peace would last at least until we stupidly promote more narcissistic assholes into power - unfortunately very likely a phenomena doomed to repeat itself. Let's refer to Douglas Adams' work for an insight into this stupidity:

The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

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

[tqk]

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

We've tried that. It never seems to work. You get them fed, and damned if they don't just turn around and start shooting at each other. :-P

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

[KZigurs]

That is what constant 1G acceleration (and braking) means. The passengers would feel as if in normal gravity.

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

[rubycodez]

which can be frozen the same as sperm, however they still need most of a fully functioning human female reproductive system for implantation. no woman, no baby. been true for hundreds of thousands of years, still true today and for foreseeable future.

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

[rubycodez]

there is no such thing, except in science fiction

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

[downhole]

True, but incomplete. The full truth is that there is no such thing as just educating people. If you are educating somebody, you are imposing your culture on them, destroying theirs in the process. The people whose kids you are trying to "educate" know full well that you are destroying their culture, and will often react violently to it. Thus it is impossible to educate a foreign people without a military occupation, and in the process, some of the occupiers and lots of the occupied will die, and piles of money will be spent.

Also true on starving people. If those people are there in the first place, then they must have some normal way of getting food that's worked well enough for their whole lives. If it suddenly stops, absent some sort of drought or environmental disaster, then it's because some local military force wants them to starve. Sending in more food doesn't address the root of the problem, which was never food. The only way it could be solved from the outside is to send in a superior military force to take over the region from the one that was denying the people food. And it isn't much of a long-term solution because the situation will go back to what it was as soon as that foreign force leaves. You can paint the force that was starving people as the bad guys, but usually every other potential force in the area, and the starving people themselves, all want to do exactly the same thing, only to some other group of people. For a long-term solution, you'd have to occupy and "educate" them them long enough to completely destroy their old culture and replace it with a new one, which takes decades.

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

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

I was operating under the assumption that we have engineers working on sexbots full time. Rule 34 and all that.

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

[ScentCone]

The people whose kids you are trying to "educate" know full well that you are destroying their culture, and will often react violently to it.

Leaving aside for the moment that educating an ignorant culture that supports people who regularly try to kill you is a form of self defense, the issue at hand (vis-a-vis Afghanistan), is that we're helping people who want to educate themselves, and who have their own teachers who want to teach their own people. And you have a violent insurgency that is seeking to prevent that. The culture that you say we're destroying is trying to educate itself, and another/sub culture kills people within that group for doing so. Local Afghani women want local Afghani girls to be able to read. Taliban insurgents want to kill them for that. We are not destroying those women's culture by saving their lives.

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

[transwarp]

Something that I always found to be a design flaw should you disintegrate after you materialised the copy not before your even sure that the process worked? That way if there a fuck up the "original" is still well and alive!

If you do it this way then you will have two copies with diverging identity. The copy at the origin site will have to be, essentially, given a gun and told to shoot himself. Who will agree to that? Disintegration before transport avoids this problem because there is no duplication of consciousness.

Or the transporter technician will end up with PTSD. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Outer_Limits)

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

[VanessaE]

So then just call it a spaceship. It would still be in keeping with ST canon, if that really matters (Kirk did occasionally use the phrase "United Spaceship Enterprise").

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

[Dcnjoe60]

You act as if ONLY space exploration can lead to these things (and actually most of they came from military spending, not space, but space has more than it's fare share to its credit).

Do you think that it is space exploration itself that leads to these great technologies or that the brightest minds are corralled and focused on a specific problem? If the former, then how did we ever get to the point of even having space exploration? If the later, then wouldn't a national effort to focus the minds of the scientific community on a different endeavor also reap similar benefits?

What about building habitats in the ocean? Could solve world hunger, find new medicines and over population. What about sustainable energy sources other than petrol based? What about turning desserts into cropland? All of these things, of course, are going on now, but not with the push of "In 10 years we will put a man on the moon..." and then marshaling the resources to do so.

It is not space exploration, in and of itself, that causes the benefits you mention. It is the collective effort of thousands of our best scientist working towards the same goal. That goal can be any number of things.

Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

Some communities. How about the entire state of Tennessee which recently passed laws allowing creationism equal time in all science curriculum's and made it possible to fire teachers if they even mention "gateway sexual activities" in any area.
What this country needs is a national curriculum which would apply to every state, city and town whether that town was in California or Tennessee. It also needs national textbooks with the subjects overseen by professionals in the field instead of local school boards deciding that "little Johnny Reb" needs to be told that America is a God Based nation like they did in Texas.
The fact that most schools have become nothing more than sports star mills might have something to do with the state of education, too.

And let the free market happen. If people don't like it, then they will move away as will the businesses. We've had national curriculums in one form or another for decades. They don't work. Ultimately, the people in the community should be responsible for what happens in their community, not some politician thousands of miles away.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

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

We've tried that. It never seems to work. You get them fed, and damned if they don't just turn around and start shooting at each other. :-P

Actually we have yet to try it in the last 100 years, with the exception of the Peace Corps which small and some religious groups, also small. What we have done is given all the aid to corrupt regimes who use it to keep in power and then they start shooting at each other.

One only has to look back at history to see who it was who funded and trained Bin Laden.

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

[geoskd]

you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.

The people paying for those expeditions were royalty. That meant they had pretty much unlimited income and only competed with other royalty for prestige. Finding things and controlling things is pretty much the only way for people in that position to gain prestige. Money is a non-issue for that level of person.

-=Geoskd

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

[lennier]

Actually it could be built for a lot less in my opinion. Much of the cost of these things is just lifting stuff up there,

A sufficient quantity of guncotton and the exigent development of a large-bore cannon could resolve this issue post-haste.

-- Jules Verne, 1865

Orbital cannons are still perfectly safe, if a rather low-budget way of getting into space.

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

[geoskd]

Being intelligent and doing creative work is not an indicator that something is wrong.

It is when the end result is this kind of worthless crap. Designing something on this scale is not the work of one guy in his basement, no matter how, otherwise, unemployed he might be. I would think very poorly of a single person who claimed to have designed an aircraft carrier in his spare time, and that project is two orders of magnitude less complicated and expensive. This is a half baked idea from someone who has watched too much sci-fi, and thinks that something like this really is viable. He is actually going to make the situation worse because this kind of thing gives engineers a bad name. Most reasonable engineers just rolled their eyes when they saw the headline. I agree with the GP, this guy needs to get laid, because its obvious he needs a new hobby.

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.

Only if that sort of thing is patrilineal. If not then your whole theory goes up in smoke. Sounds to me more like self-serving wishful thinking than inspired world planning. Maybe you should try harder to improve your own interactions with people (read: women) and worry less about how other people interact with each other.

As a last note, truly smart people have no problem getting laid because they have the power to control their interactions with the world around them to make up for any short comings. If they apply the intellect they have to the problem at hand, it becomes fairly easy to solve the problem. The only people who have trouble in that arena are the people who are not nearly as intelligent as they imagine themselves to be...

-=Geoskd

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

[tqk]

I'll clean the Jeffries Tubes.

Whew, thanks! Thought I might get stuck with that one...

That would have been funnier if I had actually bothered to login first...

I don't suppose your sister needs any help with her tubes?

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

[tqk]

I'll clean the Jeffries Tubes.

Do we wonder why there's so much Star Trek slash fiction?

Do you mean "slash" as in Freddie Kruger, or are you questioning whether ST is SF? I can't recall ever seeing any ST slasher shows. Sulu with a katana is all that comes to mind.

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

[tqk]

One only has to look back at history to see who it was who funded and trained Bin Laden.

Yup. You'd think he would have been more grateful. There's just no pleasing some people.

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

[tqk]

We are looking for a Captain... interested in the job?

As long as I don't have to wear a red shirt, you bet! Let's go get the Borg and assimilate *them*! :-)

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

[tqk]

That's not artificial gravity, that's simulated gravity.

What's the difference? I've seen motorcycles running sideways in carnivals. Once you're inside the system, centrifugal force is stronger than gravity.

No holodeck, no matter replicator, no transporter, no Star Trek style Ion Drive, ...

Feh, ya gotta start somewhere. Zephram Cochrane's warp ship had none of those either. Maybe we can convice some pointy-eared humorless jerks to part with some? No, not the Romulans, the other ones.

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

[tqk]

I think I disagree with everything you said here (you appear to be seriously lacking in the imagination dept.), but this one *really* stood out:

having multiple generations in space like that would probably mean whatever being got to the destination would be like no human on earth...

Evolution doesn't work that quickly.

Evolution doesn't enter into it. Culture does. How much evolutionary difference was there between the Mayans and Pizzaro, or between the northern Asians and the Inuit? I have trouble understanding or identifying with people twenty years younger than me even when we're using the same language.

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

[JimCanuck]

If we wanted to wait another few centuries for basic advancements sure, but the fact is that human technological progress was greatest the last century in our history, of a direct result of military funding of research, both due to World War 2, and due to the Cold War. The jump in advancements in the last century, judging by the civilian advancements in the same time period, and the past few thousand years of civilization shows us that we'd be celebrating the year 3,000 before we got someone to the moon etc.

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

[cmarkn]

Which must be why the first things all those expeditions were sending back were gold and silver.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

No - they were segmented because they had to be shipped by barge, and the segment size was dictated by the largest barge that could navigate the waters from the factory.

In the original bid process, Thiokol's bid was the least acceptable - but they got it anyway after a review - so pork cost 7 lives and a $2 billion orbiter, as well as several years delay.

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

The point is that no ion drive can provide that acceleration. And once you get to a significant portion if C, you won't be able to with any design anyway - even a bussard ramjet.

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

[tqk]

They won't do it because it's fucking stupid

I assume you're talking about this proposed so-called starship thingy. I won't disagree with you there.

The rest of us do not dress up for the sci-fi convention, do not know klingon, and do not construct models of the enterprise in our free time.

Neither do I. But if it's a choice to hang around with that crowd, or people like you with no vision inhaling Celebrity Apprentice, sucking down McD's cheeseburgers, and believing Facebook, iBaubles, and Justin Bieber are the apex of civilization, I'll go with the guys with the brow ridges.

Behold the tortoise. He makes progress by sticking his neck out.

Kaplah!

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

[downhole]

Oh, I agree entirely with the facts and moral judgement, but it doesn't change much. Yeah, Afghanistan isn't at all culturally unified, and there are cultures much more in line with what we would consider to be just and not a threat to us that we are finding and supporting, like any halfway decent COIN effort should do. But the culture that thinks women should remain ignorant, among many other things that I don't like, seems to have a pretty substantial level of popular support in Afghanistan. I support our side and our mission, but I am also aware that the other side thinks of us as destroying their culture (I agree, and think that the Taliban-style culture sucks and deserves to be destroyed).

I was hopeful at the start of the mission that we would be able to create a substantial cultural change there, but it's starting to look pretty bad - everyone seems to want to get out, a lot of the guys who were boosters for the mission initially are now saying that it's hopeless, and we've been there over 10 years and not much has really changed. Sad that the best we can hope for seems to be that after we leave, no terrorist groups will be able to plan major attacks against the western world from there for a while.

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

[sco08y]

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.

Why not Jennifer Anniston? Does being pretty make her oxygen theft any more excusable? And, fair's fair, there are plenty of man-children celebrities who would make acceptable landfill material too.

Oh hell yes!!! Just because you've never exercised your sex drive doesn't mean the rest of us wouldn't like to.

Okay, tiger, don't let me, or the restraining order, get in the way of you and Miss Anniston.

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

[tqk]

Ah, you sweet innocent naive child.

That's the nicest compliment I've heard in ages. "Yo, Matlock's on!!!"

"Slash" as in "/", like Kirk/Spock, or whomever. Fan fic.

Sigh. Why'd you say "slash" when you meant "/"?

Fine, I'm quibbling. I'm old. Be nice to your elders, please.

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

[DerekLyons]

Seems like the only feasible way to get people from here to another star system using what we know now, technology-wise.

Other than the minor sticking point that we don't actually have, or are even remotely close, to the technology required. And setting aside the assumptions you specify (which we don't actually have, or are even remotely close to the technology required to support)...
 
Yeah, then it's feasible.

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

[DerekLyons]

you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.

You remember a time that pretty much never was. The explorers that set out for the America's may not have had a guarantee of profit, but they were sure as hell hoping for personal profit in their lifetimes and so were their investors.

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

[madhi19]

How hard could it be to put a small loop in the transporter software just before the disintegration function. Am no coder but it could look like this. "Confirm transport true or false repeat until true" For that matter since pattern buffer exist in Star Trek why do they even lose peoples on away mission?

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

[cmarkn]

I think you are right that people will never go to other stars, but we can never be ready for the next step unless we start making ourselves ready. That means pushing the state of the art in all the technologies needed for long-term, long-distance space travel. The only way to do that is by having a big project, like landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade is out. Why not go ahead and dream big, and send a probe to Proxima Centauri? Watching it would require a generation mission control, because it would take 100 years of travel and then four more years of waiting for any data to come back confirming it had arrived. Would anyone even be listening after that much time?

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

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Two questions

1. What does that have to do with the stupidity that this "engineer" is proposing?

2. Do you really believe that the way that the government+NASA is operating that they could actually land someone on the moon by the end of the decade?

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

[tftp]

"Confirm transport true or false repeat until true" For that matter since pattern buffer exist in Star Trek why do they even lose peoples on away mission?

How would you know if the transport was successful if you are beaming people a hundred miles away (from a low orbit to the surface) ??? There is nobody there to confirm except the beamee. If the beamee for any reason does not respond fast enough what do you do back at the transporter controls? The beamee may be busy with defending himself; the communication may be jammed or attenuated by something; he could be overcome with atmosphere, gravity or other natural conditions of the site...

"How hard could it be to put a small loop in the transporter software just before the disintegration function. Am no coder but it could look like this."

It is sometimes difficult to store very large arrays of data for a long time. If you use today's RAM for that it would take the volume of many Libraries of Congress and power that is sufficient for a medium sized city. There are technologies today that allow you storing a lot of data at cost of either having it deteriorate over time (DRAM,) or of having lesser reliability (MLC Flash.) Considering that the pattern buffer hardware is physically smaller than the Enterprise, they were [will be?] using a storage technology that is only sufficient for a relatively brief holding time, such as tens of seconds.

Today, for example, you could build it with a spool of a fiber optic cable that has a very low velocity factor (and still you need a very long cable.) You feed pulses of light, modulated by amplitude and frequency-divided into many bands, into one end. Once the light reaches the other end of the fiber you read it, and that's all you can do (unless you loop the buffer, which was the plot of one episode.)

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

[JimCanuck]

The technological advancements made have been used with far less effect for the common man

Again, your speaking about this on a computer using the internet. Both technological advancements that wouldn't be around today without the direct involvement of Military funding during the electronic boom of the 1940-1960 time frame.

So explain to me, how the internet, which most of /. readers (and including you based on the tone of your posting) seem to think is this new Global weapon against oppression and corruption, and to be used against "the man", have been used with "less effect for the common man"? Seems to me, your attitude wouldn't work without your ability to express yourself like a Anonymous Coward, without this technology.

So again, if you feel that the internet, and modern computers are not worth it, nor is anything else developed for the military such as television, gigahertz communications, then shut down your computer, your cell phone, your TV, and take a hammer to them. Because obviously their "effect" on our lives is tiny and therefor you wont miss them.

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

[JimCanuck]

The reason for it was to fund academia through a military scapegoat: kill two birds with one stone.

Fund academia? Perhaps your talking about a different Longitude Act, because the funding was the Longitude Prizes, which by the way were only paid out if you already made a advancement, or improved a existing design. They were rewards not research funding per-say.

Real funding tends to be given out first, used up to come up with the solution then if successful more funding for improvements is given for continued advancements. But funding come before the work, rewards come after the work, there is a relative difference.

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

[DM9290]

strange revelation for you, o mama's basement dwelling virgin, growing a human can only be done inside a creature known as a "willing female". She might be willing to take a "test tube baby", or spread her legs for the unsterilized "test tube", but your idea has no legs. Specifically, no long sexy legs with a vagina and uterus between them.....

Since when did a female need to be willing to get pregnant? oh wait.. I guess because you put quotes around the phrase "willing female" you were implying that all fertile females are presumptively willing.

Good to know.

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

[DM9290]

which can be frozen the same as sperm, however they still need most of a fully functioning human female reproductive system for implantation. no woman, no baby. been true for hundreds of thousands of years, still true today and for foreseeable future.

or an artificial womb as the original post clearly stated.

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

[DM9290]

They should make it look like the Millenium Falcon. The whole ship could spin like a flying saucer to create gravity.

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

[Coren22]

If it is used as a test bed for new propulsion technology, having the nacelles away from the body of the ship could be helpful. Not all propulsion tech is as clean as ion engines. But if it will never be upgraded or used as a test bed, the design of the Millennium Falcon would be better.

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

[madhi19]

According to TNG cannon Montgomery Scott spent like 70 years in a transporter buffer from the 23rd century. You think they could not keep a few paterns for the duration of any away mission with 24th century tech. As for knowing if a transport was successful they keep track of peoples to be beamed up by communicator and sensor. After all you do need to have a transporter lock to beam peoples up!

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

[JimCanuck]

Again, you keep arguing with the assumption that only military means are possible. Both logic and history go against that assumption.

No what I am saying is the military seems to be more efficient at it. And our world today shows that to be the case.

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

[nickersonm]

Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible. By the time you get to ~0.7c, you've used up half the mass of your ship if you have a perfectly efficient matter to kinetic energy converter (eg. a 100% efficient photon drive). I.E. your kinetic energy is now equal to your rest mass. Good luck getting anywhere near that with conventional propulsion methods!

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

[JWSmythe]

    Actually, something like a Borg Cube would be most appropriate. Us humans tend to build things with the expectation of flat sides and right angles. If the ship were modular, component cubes could be moved anywhere on the ship. If one design needed a single engine to fire from the center mass, it would be put on the center of which ever face was to be the "rear". If the design had two, three, or four engines, the ship design wouldn't limit it. I know scifi shows a lot of hex shaped containers as optimal, but that is less than ideal considering we have a lot of square objects, and the need for various sizes. A spare engine would need a lot more space than pens, paper, and procedure manuals.

    The Millennium Falcon was a neat design, but based on the flying saucer idea. We easily recognized it as a spaceship that could fly long distances, because decades of science fiction had already taught us that it was the correct design. That's the same reason We knew the X-Wing Fighter was a combat craft. It needed no explanation, we already had decades of military aircraft. The Tie Fighter looks like a bi-plane on it's side. It gives the impression of older technology, not as fast or fancy as the X-wing.

    In reality, objects in space have very little reason for being aerodynamic. If it were large enough, solar winds may help or hinder its performance. There is free hydrogen floating around, but it would take a huge craft to require aerodynamics to allow it to make a difference. The shape may allow micrometeorites to deflect better, but that would be contingent on the craft pointing straight at where it's coming from, and align the impact to make a glancing blow. As they can come from any direction, and rotating for anything that may be out there would only serve to give the crew motion sickness.

    The general idea of a long tube with rings is likely to be most efficient. The body of the ship only needs to be a structure to hold the rings together, and an attachment point for thrust. Overall, it would need to have symmetric mass, so centered thrust would push it straight. Otherwise, offset mass or offset thrust would make a lovely pinwheel, until the forces ripped it apart.

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

[Coren22]

My understanding of ships like the one in 2001 A Space Odyssey, or in Avatar, was that the engines were far away to reduce radiation risk to the crew capsule. Using a Cube would not give you the distance, so you would need other shielding methods, however, the Enterprise has the distance from drive built into the design. Ion drives don't produce meaningful radiation, so the Cube design, sphere, cylinder or whatever is fine, but if you have any intention of swapping out the engines ever to test new engines, having nacelles is a good thing.

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

[JWSmythe]

Well, with a cube design, if the sub-cubes could be reorganized, it would be trivial to make an extension of cubes, and an engine at the end. That would allow for changes in the structure strength. If one column would be crushed, distributing the force across two or four may handle it.

    In a single fixed tube design, if your force is too great, you're screwed without building a new ship.

    Who's to say what the next technology would be like. Some ideas, like the ion thruster has been around for a while (invented in the early 1900's, first practical test in the 1950's), but they are low force engines. Something like the idea of blowing up nukes behind the ship has been around since the 1940's, but as far as I know it's never had a practical test. I would think that would need a structure of significant strength.

    It's very likely that once we start experimenting in space with advanced propulsion, with engineers on board who can improve the design, and scientists observing the effects. Actually, that's the only way we're going to make significant progress on our propulsion techniques. Having people on hand, who can make changes on the spot is far better than proposals, meetings, committees, and then finding the budget to launch another rocket with the new test. It's years between proposal to testing, if it ever gets a chance to be tested in space at all.

    Consider something as simple as a solar sail. A few have been put up. They haven't been very big. Someone on the spot could test round vs square, single layer vs double layer, changes in the support structure, paper vs mylar, etc, etc, etc.. We'll most likely find our best benefits when someone says "Hmm, I wonder what happens if....". Think of what was improvised with duct tape by the Apollo astronauts.

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

[Sique]

In fact, Cristobal Colón advertised his exploration trip with ROI from the beginning - according to his theories, the Earth circumfence was about 15,000 mls instead of the actual 25,000 mls, He proposed to go to India via the western route because according to his theories, this way would be much shorter. He calculated something about 4000 mls for the whole trip, and it would avoid going around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, which was explored by the Portuguese at the time.
The Portuguese knew the circumfence of the Earth was 25,000 mls, and they knew a western route would be more than 14000 mls and thus unattractive, so Cristobal Colón went to Spain instead and managed to persuade the Queen of Spain. And it wasn't until his third trip to New Spain, that he realized he had discovered a new continent. Other people at his time already figured so much, and Amerigo Vespucci was fast in publishing new maps with the new continent drawn in, thus we call it America now and not Colombia.

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

[khipu]

Unfortunately, constant high acceleration is energetically impossible

That assumes that you carry all your fuel with you. There are plenty of other possibilities.

By the time you get to ~0.7c

What speed "you get to" has nothing to do with it, 1g acceleration is still 1g. In Earth's frame of reference, the acceleration contributes little to your reduction in travel time, but in the spacecraft's frame of reference, it does (through time dilation).

However, there are energetically much cheaper ways of getting the same effective "time dilation" effect.

actually...

[irussel]

screw the starship...just give me the holodeck. without the glitches preferably.

Re:actually...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

screw the starship...just give me the holodeck. without the glitches preferably.

If you had a holodeck, you wouldn't have to screw a starship, you know...

Mother of all Kickstarters

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell the mother of all kickstarters launching in 5, 4, 3, 2 ...

Re:Mother of all Kickstarters

[lance_of_the_apes]

Well, duh. All they need is for one billion people to pledge one thousand dollars each. It's in the bag!

Re:Mother of all Kickstarters

[Aiwendil]

I smell the mother of all kickstarters launching in 5, 4, 3, 2 ...

So, we are building C.P.P. Kickstart?

Database Error

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't even build a website to withstand Slashdotting. You'd trust them building a ship to take you into space?

Re:Database Error

[pitchpipe]

Especially because a Slashdotting ain't what it used to be.

I could not find it

[skipkent]

I could not find this project on kickstarter

Star ship Enterprise?

[dispersionrelation]

The proposed ship would be starship Enterprise in the same sense the space shuttle Enterprise is the star ship enterprise. Not really a star ship if it can't travel between the stars... So why spend 20 years and 1 trillion dollars building a ship to explore the solar system? I think it would be much cheaper, quicker and more feasible to simply build an armada of probes to explore great tracts of the solar system in a much shorter period of time for much less money then a single ship flying from world to world.

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.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Twinbee]

If that's where we're going to be eventually - in space. We'll get there a lot quicker by building 'useless' projects like this. Plus it's exciting. More exciting than say, oh I don't know, spending 1 trillion on blowing up the world or something.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

In twenty years, we will be almost exactly where we are, today. We won't have returned to the moon. We won't have gone to mars. We probably won't even have a space station (the ISS is on its last leg and, I believe, is already serving longer than was originally intended). For all intents and purposes, our space exploration is on total fucking hold while we piss ourselves over pot-holes on earth, because our sense of discovery is fucking DONE as a society.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[RodBee]

I didn't know the only alternative was to make bombs with the money.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you kill with oil? Oil drowning?

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Junta]

We'll get there a lot quicker by building 'useless' projects like this.

I doubt it. If taking this project at face value (which is dubious since "a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years" is a credential gobs of random people could claim), then it is a trillion dollars just to build the thing. That's more than 6 fold the cost of building *and* operating the ISS for 15 years. The result is a single facility that isn't particularly efficient at any specific task that seems to incur a high cost simply for the vanity of resembling an oversized variant of a science fiction construct. It also means that one accident and *poof*, a trillion in resources down the drain.

I would imagine that multiple, purpose oriented projects could more practically meet the same ends. The 'coolness' of a few decades old sci-fi show isn't enough to offset the sticker shock delta between practical endeavors and this.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Twinbee]

Maybe you're right. I'm sure we'd learn a lot on the way though.

I also guess material science (to name but one) will advance so much in the next 100 years that we should wait anyway like you say.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[AshtangiMan]

It's just what we are currently doing with it. GP could have said that it's better than throwing the money at training strippers, but since we aren't already doing that, and because that may actually garner a lot of support here, it would not have been as strong an argument.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[mcavic]

our sense of discovery is fucking DONE as a society

I don't think so. But we're too preoccupied with bullshit to get anything done.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[MacGyver2210]

material science (to name but one) will advance so much in the next 100 years

Not nearly as much as if we had an effort to design materials suitable for long-term space habitation, ship structure, impact/micrometeorite protection, etc.

Even if this project doesn't leave Earth orbit, it would still be a monumental step in the right direction from a planet that values rotten underground dinosaur juice to be more important than any type of space program at all.

I don't remember who said it, or the exact wording, but I think it was something like: "If aliens showed up, we would stop fighting amongst ourselves and unify as Humans very quickly".

Come on, Aliens, give us a hand on this one.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nukes cost far less than a trillion dollars. If we simply wanted to kill brown people with oil, it can be done much less.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tar and Feather? a lot?

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Twinbee]

That'd be weird to have aliens to help humanity unify. Imagine us as the aliens to another planet, and how we could help that planet's 'people' form peace with each other by trying to go to war with them ourselves (temporarily). There's one to add to the list of 'moral dilemmas',

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Lawrence_Bird]

you are a fucking idiot you know that right? How about Cassini, a 'mega' probe cost about $3.5B and many smaller automated probes cost in the low hundreds of millions. How many of those could you do for $1T over 20 years? So many that you wouldn't use all the money up. There is NO REASON for manned exploration of the solar system. The environment is hostile to man and trying to accomodate the needs when there is nothing to be gained is the height of foolish burning of money.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[TheLink]

Giving me 1 trillion dollars is also better than killing brown people with oil.

How about we do that first?

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not as good as spending a trillion dollars on solar, wind, tidal, fusion and fission power research.

Or just build a couple hundred fission power plants and tell the middle east to go drink their oil.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[rgbrenner]

Nope, we would definitely unify. Aliens would show up, round us up like cattle, and make themselves I nice steak.

Cows don't try to get humans to side with them against other cows... and humans don't care either -- they're all going to be turned into tasty hamburgers.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Americano]

About 700 billion of this year's 3.6 trillion budget is for defense spending. The rest is largely medicare, medicaid, social security, and other "social" spending.

I know everybody likes to pretend that we only spend money on building bombs, but that's demonstrably not the case.

Now, 700 billion is a lot of money, certainly. And certainly, you could probably enact quite a few cuts and save some money. But even eliminating military spending entirely would only cut the budget by about 20% - and you cannot just disband the military entirely, for obvious reasons. And 80% of the budget is being spent on things that are NOT building bombs.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Twinbee]

Yes, I didn't say that there wasn't something even perhaps more worthwhile to put the money to (better energy creation/batteries/materials spring to mind).

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[AshtangiMan]

And you're not accounting for did spending outside the budget (the so called black money). But I'm not talking annual budget I'm talking program budget, and no one in this thread has said the things that you attribute to "everybody". So if you have a point then make it, but your previous post doesn't actually say anything.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[lobiusmoop]

The problem is that the trillion dollars becomes worthless without that oil belonging to the brown people. Take the oil out of the equation and a trillion dollars doesn't get you a starship, it gets you a loaf of bread (ask somebody from Zimbabwe)

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[TheLink]

Fine, give me the money upfront and I'll start[0] by paying scientists to work on designing and building a space station with actual artificial gravity[1] and decent radiation shielding.

Once we have that technology working in practical ways it removes the main obstacles to long term human space travel and inhabitation. It would no longer matter so much that it takes months to get to some place in the solar system.

Next step would be tests on space-based mining, factories and farms[2]. These can be done concurrently.

Then space colonies, and self-sustaining space colonies.

In contrast much of the human space travel stuff NASA is working on appears to be mostly dead end stuff. You are not going to have a viable human colony using that tech (drugs to slow wasting and bone loss etc). It can come in handy for specific cases, but it's pretty stupid to waste time, resources and money on this sort of stuff at our current tech stage. All that NASA talk about going to Mars is stupid at this stage too- Mars is a gravity well. Only do it later when the space colonies are rich and thriving (from the asteroids).

[0] Or I might just spend it all on women and cool toys ;).
[1] Example option for a small station is using tethers and a counterweight.
[2] Fish farms could be one of the many good farm options. Sunlight + CO2 + nitrogen+iron for algae.The fish (e.g. tilapia) eat the algae, the humans eat the fish. I suspect fish farms could be fine in low-g regions of a space station/colony (water oxygenation could be a problem in zero-g regions, but maybe the fish and their food might be able do fine in an air-water foam). It'll cost a lot to get that much water up into space, but we should later be able to get lots of water from asteroids and similar. So initial ones would be small scale test farms which should cost less to set up.

Farms on the Moon might be worth considering - but there are many unknowns - lunar soil is very very different from earth soil. Better to stick to hydroponics.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Americano]

But I'm not talking annual budget I'm talking program budget

Yes, and the program budget is ridiculously underestimated, and likely to be *orders of magnitude* off the actual cost. So much so that you'd need to disband the military entirely for decades in order to pay for it "out of the defense budget."

Unless we've got zero-gravity mining, smelting, metalworking, and other tools to build all this stuff with already that I've never heard of... the entire industrial process from mining to assembly must be rethought and reworked, or we're going to ship every piece up from earth, decimating our own environment and exhausting our resources in the process. Not to mention, you can't just have 2 people assembling the thing, so you're looking at shipping tens or hundreds of astronauts into space, with no place for them to live, while they construct this ship. And then you have to keep shipping supplies up to them. Either this will be done with hundreds of robots that don't exist yet (and which must be developed), or you're talking trillions of dollars *just to start the operation.*

That's a big, and expensive toy. And if any person anywhere in the process screws up and connect something wrong, measures something wrong, assembles something wrong, or simply takes it in his head that he's gonna show those people not to discipline him for safety violations, you have a multi-trillion dollar fireball re-entering earth's atmosphere and (hopefully) breaking up and landing relatively harmlessly in the ocean, or (worst case) slamming into a populated area.

In short, the point is this: Building a giant spaceship in space is something that will not be "affordable" even if we disbanded the military entirely. It would require several years worth of our entire federal budget being spent to ever become a reality. And even then, it will be a ridiculously inefficient, ineffective, and mostly useless boondoggle.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[gmuslera]

Not just probes, resource gathering/mining, in place analysis, reacting on time. You need a lot more than just mars rover clones. But i would bet on asteroid mining and space factories long before trying to build big ships.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[rubycodez]

bullshit, we don't have to war with anyone to buy oil. we could get by with a military 1/10 the present size. The only things our pointless wars do is increase the price of oil, and we certainly aren't fighting anyone who attacked us on 9/11 in either afghanistan ( they left) nor Iraq (never were there)

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[AshtangiMan]

The first I saw "out of the defense budget" was your post (and I don't really think you have a good estimate of the defense budget). I didn't really read the rest because it spuds like you're arguing something but I think it's not with anything ive said.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[gmuslera]

The future isnt somewhere out there waiting for us. Will be no way to get there if we don't build it.

We will run out of space, of food, of resources in general, at the current rate, and we still have no options of what to do when that happens. We can optimize things, like turning deserts into usable land, or making better use of oceans, or better recycling, but that just will slow down the process, not stop it.

Of course, we can kill, directly or indirectly, half or the majority of mankind to have just some of those resources back (you can put a lot of wars as wars for resources, specially the very recent ones, and thousands to millons of people died on or around them), but then the cost will be far higher than 1T.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Americano]

Here, let me refresh your memory:

Twinbee wrote, "Plus it's exciting. More exciting than say, oh I don't know, spending 1 trillion on blowing up the world or something."

To which Rodbee replied, "I didn't know the only alternative was to make bombs with the money."

To which YOU replied, "It's just what we are currently doing with it. GP could have said that it's better than throwing the money at training strippers, but since we aren't already doing that, and because that may actually garner a lot of support here, it would not have been as strong an argument."

Since, you know, "building bombs with the money," ("what we are currently doing with it," as you said) is, you know, "Defense spending," my point about the Defense budget being orders of magnitude too small for the purpose of "building a starship," even if you completely disbanded the military was quite topical.

Guess it's hard to think clearly when all the blood's maintaining that Star Trek hardon.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[AshtangiMan]

It would in fact be very easy to get one trillion dollars to fund a 10 year project out of the defense budget only. As a nation our priorities are feeding the defense industry trillions of dollars each decade with very little to show for it. We could cut the f35 program, then close all overseas bases. You only need to cut the dod budget by 15% annually.

But that's really not the point. The point is that we waste more money than the mission would cost. Do I think that mission is the best use for the money? Probably not. But it's better than what we are currently doing with it.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Americano]

But that's really not the point. The point is that we waste more money than the mission would cost.

No, the point is that the proposed cost of the mission is orders of magnitude too low. And it would actually cost us numerous years of the entire federal budget to even hope to realize this project, because either:

1) We would have to invent, test, refine, and finalize every piece of industry required to "build it in space" (remember, digging ore out of a rock is the easy part - smelting, casting, storing and assembling, plus building the hundreds of assembly robots (or shipping, housing, and resupplying all of the human assemblers) is much larger in scale than ANYTHING we have ever attempted in space before. This makes the ISS look like making a scrambled egg.

2) We would have to build everything down here, and ship it up to orbit, at an exorbitant $/kg launch cost, where it would STILL need to be assembled by a fleet of robots and/or people specially built and trained for this single mission.

There is no chance in hell that the cost of this will run "only" to a trillion dollars. Realistically, we're probably talking TENS, perhaps HUNDREDS of trillions of dollars, not "one trillion." Because again, NONE of the technology we would need to build it up there in space has been developed, or scaled to the size we'd need. The space shuttle's total costs were nearly 200 billion. The ISS has cost us $150 billion. These are a SMALL fraction of the scale of the operation you're talking about here.

Do I think that mission is the best use for the money? Probably not. But it's better than what we are currently doing with it.

You could have stopped at "Probably not." Because if it's "probably not the best use for the money," then there is absolutely zero need or justification for spending it. If you're going to tax your citizens for a ridiculous boondoggle, you don't deserve to be running things. (And yes, I believe this sentiment applies to wasteful government spending in all categories. If it's not money well spent, you are incompetent and don't deserve to be in a position where you can spend that money.)

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[AshtangiMan]

My point is what I said it was. Not that this is necessairly a good idea (you certainly make some passionate please against it) but that the original point made is valid (it's a better use than what we are currently doing with the money which is destroying things). I really couldn't care less if you agree, but you keep wanting to argue a different point. Where is your passion towards the trillions of dollars we are spending to destroy? Is that something you view as money well spent? The point is that our current use of money is getting us nowhere and is moving us backwards. Money spent on this mission would be constructive, and after 10 years at a moderate funding level I'd be surprised if there were not some fundamental breakthroughs. I would be against it though, for a lot of the same reasons you would be. But it is still a better use of the money than what we are currently doing with it.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[tqk]

There is NO REASON for manned exploration of the solar system.

You're. A. Fool.

If Armstrong had not been on board, the whole thing would have hit hard and smashed like a Martian lander whose engineers were confusing imperial with metric system. Automation has its place. Don't overestimate its real worth.

The most sophisticated machine is analogous to just a stupid hammer.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If Armstrong had not been on board, the whole thing would have hit hard and smashed like a Martian lander whose engineers were confusing imperial with metric system.

And why would it do that? The onboard systems performed almost flawlessly. The only problem that I can point to was that at the time there was no way for a machine to recognize a suitable landing area as far as boulder size is concerned. That would probably require some serious CV implementation.

Re:Star ship Enterprise?

[Lawrence_Bird]

And if Armstrong had not been on board we would have saved hundreds of billions. What has been the return on the moon rocks that Apollo brought back? Is there anything which was done on the moon that could not have been done by automated machinery?

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:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[ColdWetDog]

Yep, in a journey to the stars, the first hundred miles is a real bitch.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[belthize]

Done, http://www.planetaryresources.com/ no gravity well problem because all resources collection occurs outside the well. Just have to lift people and food and even the latter could be done in space.

Granted they may not be ready with supplies soon enough for his timescale. It's merely a question of priorities. If, as a species, we decided this was a useful expense we could do it. The money spent planet wide on military in the last decade would be more than enough.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[sphealey]

...because all resources collection occurs outside the well.

Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there unfortunately.

sPh

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[rmdingler]

Smart. This may be tangentially related to the recent speculation in asteroid mining. Even with extreme costs in dollars and lives factored in, raw materials shipped from earth would be far costlier.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[FridayBob]

... 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. ...

Not so fast. I'm not very optimistic about this project ever getting off of the ground either, but the issue that you raise is easily circumvented if most of the mass for the ship comes from a captured asteroid and the whole thing is manufactured and assembled in orbit.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[MacGyver2210]

Well it sounds like that is a wonderful cause for Moon Base Alpha, and extra-planetary mining and resource collection.

The Enterprise(even in the TV show) was constructed in an orbital ship dock. They didn't build it on the ground and launch it.

We should be able to do it like a giant orbital 3D printer which deposits Titanium alloy instead of plastic.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[Teancum]

...because all resources collection occurs outside the well.

Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there unfortunately.

Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit. I don't know how much that justifies spending their corporate resources on building something like a 1:1 scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but I think the egg has been laid. The problem now is simply getting a big enough chicken to be able to do something useful.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[MacGyver2210]

It requires much less in the way of resources to mine them from the moon/asteroids and maneuver them into the right place for construction than it would to launch it all from the ground.

Clearly, the extra-planetary resource gathering would come first. There is no chicken/egg issue.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[the gnat]

Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit

Only because they're just doing technology development with a budget in the millions to tens of millions, and not actually doing any of the messy stuff yet, like orbital launches. I wish them the best of luck, because it would be a huge advance if they can make their business plan work, but let's wait and see how they're doing after spending billions of dollars on launch infrastructure before we break out the triumphalism, okay?

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

Yep, that would be the Star Tram.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[joe_frisch]

NO, its not the first 100 miles, its the 10km/sec required to reach orbit. All of these "spaceship 1" type projects are nowhere near the delta-v required to reach orbit and this has caused a lot of confusion. Getting to 100 miles is relatively easy - the delta-V is below the exhaust velocity of chemical rockets so you don't need a huge mass ratio. The problem with orbit is that the delta-V is higher than a chemical propellant so the fuel / mass ratio of the rocket becomes large.

Earth to orbit is of course possible - we've been doing it for half a century, but its still expensive and difficult.

--- Joe Frisch

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[belthize]

The GP's argument regarded lifting materials out of Earth's gravity well, the replies pointed out that wouldn't be the most efficient approach.

As for your other rambling points. Using electrical current for smelting has been around for over 100+ years http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12293/m1/58/, but even if you had to resort to some 17th century model of a big crucible and oxygen the idea that there's no oxygen in space is rather odd. Air pressure, elecromagnets and centrifuges are regularly used in smelting, manufacturing and assembly on Earth where there's that annoying extra acceleration to be dealt with. Most robotic assembly systems would work better in zero-g as there's no preferred orientation when moving parts around. Keeping something fixed in space is easy, it's only a problem when you insert humans who have an annoying physiological view of 'up'.

The only thing that we're pretty sure doesn't exist in plentiful abundance outside the Earth are people and food. Those we'd probably have to lift unless you're incredibly patient and don't personally want to go (though I predict a huge market for zero-g veal someday).

Is all of that supply chain trivial or even partially solved, of course not, is it hugely expensive, yep. But your description of the nature of the problem is pretty far off and in any event when (not if) humans build space ships to explore the solar system they won't be lifting the resources off Earth as the GP suggested.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[rubycodez]

utter bullshit, hydrogen and oxygen can be made by clean means, and burn to make water.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[Teancum]

Did anybody say that Planetary Resources is building launchers? I didn't see that anywhere in their literature.

The big products they are building at the moment are space-based telescopes, where apparently they have a fully functional working prototype and a number of their Arkyd-100 spacecraft that have already been sold with some significant progress toward building their Arkyd-200 spacecraft. It is the "has already been sold" aspect that makes them profitable, even though I have no idea who the customers are (and Planetary Resources doesn't seem too eager to reveal either).

I don't know what sort of launch infrastructure you need to build if you aren't building a launcher, but perhaps I'm missing something here. Besides, there are a dozen different companies building launch vehicles, so why would they re-invent the wheel to do that again? Building a clean room for satellite integration and developing a mounting bracket for a payload faring system sounds somewhat reasonable, but I wasn't aware that kind of engineering required billions of dollars worth of investment.

Planetary Resoruces is also building thrusters that can move those spacecraft once they are already in space, but that is an entirely different engineering realm and also doesn't require billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investment, where many of the thruster systems needed can be purchased from existing rocket builders as well.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[the gnat]

Sorry, my typo: I should have written "orbital infrastructure". Even if they contract out for launches (which I agree would be the logical thing to do), and even assuming that the launch costs come down significantly, getting all that hardware into orbit is a shitload of money. They're talking about moving industrial production into space, something that has never been done before. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make it more efficient than what NASA does, but I can't see how this isn't going to cost billions of dollars in up-front expenses by the time they actually get around to asteroid mining. I'd certainly love to be wrong, and I'm glad someone is trying this - however, it's an incredible leap to go from what they're doing now to being able to support building a 1000-person interplanetary spaceship.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[Teancum]

I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X (perhaps not that specific design, but something like it). That could be done with existing technology and using things like Bigelow habitat modules with some hard engineering work put into the thruster system.

I agree that getting a productive mine going in space is going to cost billions of dollars. The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well. It is a tough business decision, but something that does have precedence here on the Earth for mineral acquisition, and ways to raise that kind of money to get things of that nature going.

The key part of getting something going in space is getting the cost of spaceflight from the Earth to low-Earth orbit to drop significantly from the $10k/kg that is pretty typical at the moment. If that cost can drop to less than $1k/kg, it opens up a whole bunch of other potential applications in space. That seems to be a reasonable price target at the moment as well... tough to accomplish but possible.

One other thing about Planetary Resources is that their operation can scale. They don't necessarily need to harvest a 10km asteroid immediately, and it may be possible to identify a 1m or 10m asteroid (more like a boulder in space) and try to bring that to the Earth. Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.

Re:Modulo the small problem of getting into orbit

[the gnat]

I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X

I agree completely - I think the central premise of this article is insane.

The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well.

Okay, but that actually makes me more pessimistic - those aren't being constructed in the middle of a vacuum and bombarded by hard radiation. The production of the open pit mine is also going to be directed towards terrestrial applications, e.g. consumer goods and construction. The only justification for space mining right now would be to avoid having to launch crude resources up a gravity well for space-based projects, which also aren't profitable.

Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.

Sure, but what can you do with a 1m asteroid in orbit? You still need to build infrastructure to process these rocks and turn them into something else, which is where the real money sink is. I'm sure it's possible to build a spacecraft capable of towing a much larger asteroid into high orbit for not too much money, but building an orbital refinery to extract useful materials will be a huge task, even if we optimistically assume that Space-X, Bigelow, etc. succeed in making orbital travel affordable for a private company. To be fair, I haven't thought through the logistics very thoroughly (which I'm sure the backers have), but I still don't see where this becomes profitable. At best I can see it being sustainable through the incomes of a group of interested billionaires who aren't expecting to make anything back - which, granted, would be a huge improvement over the current situation.

"We have the technological reach . . ."

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Technological reach is never the problem. Political reach is.

Re:"We have the technological reach . . ."

[Trepidity]

Sometimes true, but I would wager that technological issues might actually be even more insurmountable than political ones when it comes to building warp engines.

Re:"We have the technological reach . . ."

[evil_aaronm]

I got it: as someone posted above, we tend to spend more on weapons than other useful stuff. So, to fund it, we tout it as a defense against alien invasion. You know, instead of waiting for those bulbous green-eyed bastards that want to suck our brains out with their probosces, we need to create a star fleet to go on the offensive.

There's gotta be at least one general or admiral who'll latch on to it and push Congress for it.

Re:"We have the technological reach . . ."

[DigiShaman]

Forget warp engines for a moment. I'd like to see someone design a workable fusion reactor in a space faring vessel. Zero-G, constant shifts in inertia...what an engineering nightmare! OTOH, I suppose computers of the future will make that a much easier job.

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.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[gstrickler]

And if A is small relative to 1G, you won't notice it.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[RichMan]

And if A is small relative to 1G you won't get anywhere.
Certainly not mars in 90 days.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[belthize]

Yeah, the enterprise is a cruddy shape. One could make a set of rings arranged as a group in a ring. During one G acceleration the small rings rotate so up is direction of travel. During coasting the larger ring rotates, during maneuvering and speeds between full thrust and coasting the individual rings re-orient or spin to create a sense of constant gravity and orientation. Transfer from one set of rings to the other is through the center into a zero-g orientation neutral pathway.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[zippthorne]

Ion engines don't provide significant thrust force, but they run continuously for a *very* long time, which is an ideal coupling with solar power and low launch weight.

A G, so it doesn't really matter.

If A ~ G, and you can run continuously anyway, then you don't need a spinning disk - whenever the engines are on, they define up and down for you.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[theswimmingbird]

Easy fix. Reroute emergency power to inertial dampeners and the structural integrity field.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually to get to mars in 90 days doesn't need that much acceleration at all.

Using S = 0.5*a*t*t, starting at zero, and plugging in 56000000000m, t = 90*24*3600s, we get an acceleration of 0.002ms-2 - a hell of a lot less than 1G.

The problem is that you need constant acceleration, but if we can get ion/vasimir drives to work with enough thrust, it's possible.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[John Newman]

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.

At 1G constant acceleration (flipping around mid-way) you'd reach Mars in about 3 days. (Avg Distance 225M km, travel time to half-way point at 10m/s/s = 42 hrs).

Stretching the trip to 90 days works out to 0.0015G acceleration throughout. I'm guessing the crew wouldn't notice that.

[Moral: When talking about acceleration, 1 G is a *lot*. It'll get you to alpha centauri in 4 years!]

h/t Wolfram Alpha

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[RichMan]

Thanks for the correction was trying to do the math and find out what the acceration would be.

0.0015G is acceleration so 2A = 0.003G

At 0.3G would be a real problem
At 0.03G I would expect a study needed. While staying still for some time you would likely get currents in your inner ear.
At 0.003G I expect it would be below threshold. But still should be studied for long exposure before doing a trip. You would not want you crew to get all dizzy after 30 days in space.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[gstrickler]

So, now that 2 ACs have demonstrated you're incorrect, maybe people with mod points will take notice.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[garyebickford]

Which is why the Enterprise design isn't ideal. Better to put the spin axis on the drive axis. Then the force is constant. The net force would be at some angle between axial and radial, depending on their relationship, which would vary as thrust varied. But thrust need not vary often, only when changing direction or flipping one end for the other to decelerate.

Of course, if we could get 1G acceleration for a few decades, it would be a moot issue. But that's unlikely for a long time, if ever.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[pz]

And better to put the thrust axis in-line with the center of mass while you're at it.

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[michelcolman]

I don't think that would be a huge problem with the rather low accelleration from ion engines, but I noticed a couple of other glaring errors that may not say much about the impossibility of the design, but certainly about the skills of the engineer, raising questions about the quality of the rest of his work if he made similar mistakes and oversights elsewhere.

For starters, the paragraph about eliminating friction to avoid the Enterprise rotating. He says that the gravity wheel is magnetically suspended in a donut-shaped cavity inside the hull, this cavity is kept in a vacuum, so no additional forces are required to keep it spinning, and therefore the ship will not tend to rotate. But actually, even if there was friction between the two (which you would have to compensate for with some kind of force between the two parts), the ship would still not tend to rotate. If you let it spin down due to friction, yes, then the Enterprise would tend to rotate due to exactly these frictional forces between the two until both were rotating at the same rate. But if you apply a force to compensate for the friction to keep the rotational speed constant, the total force between the parts is zero. The gravity wheel doesn't change its rotational speed, and neither does the rest of the Enterprise. You only need to compensate for anything if the gravity wheel spins up or down. I don't see any reason for an extra counterrotating wheel at all, since the wheel only spins up or down for a short time and it's easy to compensate for with the engines during that time.

Then, filling the counter rotating wheel with water or propellant... how exactly are you going to get it out? Spin it down first every time you need some?

Those are just the two things that jumped out at me. I stopped reading the rest. Although I am wondering how he's going to handle turns. Spin down the gravity wheel first? Or deal with all the gyroscopic forces that would probably tear the whole thing apart?

Re:gravity wheel has weird orientation wrt thrust

[garyebickford]

Yes. I should have mentioned that. I always wondered how the Enterprise handled the tendency to do continuous loop-de-loops! It appears to me that the warp pods are off-axis. And, then of course, the structural strength required to pass all that thrust through to the rest of the hull means that that part of the ship that connects the drives and the main hull to the circular part must have taken up most of the space inside that part of the ship.

I wonder about this

[cvtan]

1) Building a high-tech gadget means it will be obsolete before it is half done. This is not like building a cathedral.
2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.

Re:I wonder about this

[Lumpy]

Well the solution is to allow the republicans to have full control. Remove minimum wage limits and reinstate slavery.

Now we can mine all the resources and build the raw materials cheaply. The real workers, the managers and executives can get incredibly high pay while they supervise the construction. I am guessing we will have to pay the scientists something, unless there is a way we can change the laws so that they are forced to work because it is for national security... Oh that is a brilliant idea... Those executives deserve their pay, they need a raise! An extra million a year for everyone who has a corner office!

Re:I wonder about this

[whisper_jeff]

2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.

Wrong. The money is there - it's just currently going to killing people for oil.

http://costofwar.com/en/

Re:I wonder about this

[the gnat]

2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.

You forgot:

3) No way this is going to cost only $1 trillion.

If you read studies by people who actually do this kind of thing for a living, it's obvious that these programs are vastly more expensive than this engineer thinks. His budget estimate is probably made assuming that there will never be any unexpected technical, political, or economic obstacles, that cost overflows will always be zero, and everything will work the first time. I'd guess this means that it's off by an order of magnitude. (Note that the total cost for Apollo was estimated to be $170 billion in 2005 dollars, and Apollo is child's play compared to this.)

A secondary problem is that he's put all of his eggs in one basket, creating one impossibly complex system that has too many points of failure just because it looks cool. The ISS is tiny compared to this and runs on technology we understand and mostly have lots of experience with, and it still cost $150 billion and is a pain in the ass to maintain. We would do far better to design a smaller ship - say, a crew of 10 - powered by a single nuclear reactor, and build a half-dozen of these. I'd bank on it being significantly less expensive than his Enterprise, more sustainable, and far likelier to succeed. But even this would be a massive undertaking; in another couple of decades it might look more realistic.

This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[dougmc]

This is nothing like the Enterprise except in shape -- and it would be pointless to duplicate the shape.

And besides, in the Enterprise world, dilithium crystals (with antimatter in there somewhere) were the power source of "reality", and "ion power" was what made Scottie get all wide-eyed.

With current technology, we'd end up with a generational sublight ship. Keeping in with the Star Trek theme, this would be closer to the SS Botany Bay which according to Star Trek canon was launched only 18 years ago. Of course, that turned out horribly wrong, so maybe it's not the mission to emulate.

Joking aside, making such a ship would be very neat. But the guy needs to stop pretending that it has anything to do with Star Trek or it's Enterprise. We could call it Enterprise if we wanted, but picking that shape would be silly -- there are much more practical shapes to be had. And considering just how expensive this would be, we should be trying to make it practical rather than novel.

Re:This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[dpilot]

I threw this post against the submitted story, but this looks like a good anchor to bring it over here, slightly abridged...

Form follows function. The form of the Enterprise, if it were to follow any sort of function at all, would have been dictated by warp physics, not gravitywheels and ion engines. You could force-fit a nuclear-reactor powered ion-engine propelled spaceship into a shape like the Enterprise, I suppose. But I'm sure there would be other, much more logical shapes.

Like f'rinstance the Discovery from 2001, or the starship from Avatar.

Re:This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[dougmc]

The form of the Enterprise, if it were to follow any sort of function at al

The function of the shape of the Enterprise is to look cool. (And it succeeded, I might add.) Everything else comes from that.

Actually, if I recall correctly the shape came first, but then the series creators realized it couldn't land on a planet, so they added the shuttlecraft and transporters ...

As for logical shapes, I'd think where it was a rotating cylinder or sphere (for gravity) with its propulsion at the center would make the most sense. The engines could rotate with the rest of the ship or be stopped with some sort of coupling (though the coupling might be problematic.)

This is a well thought out essay on how we'd build space ships with current technology to wage war with -- many of the considerations would not apply to a ship not meant for battle, but still, he seems to have a good handle on things.

All this said, I guess the guy's idea of making it look like the Enterprise isn't really a failure, as it gets people talking about it. If it was just a sphere with a rocket, nobody would care (no matter how good the idea was, though it's not a new idea by any stretch). But by making it all Star Trekkish, we all talk about how to correct it and that's exposure that the idea wouldn't have had before.

Re:This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[Teancum]

Gene Roddenberry deliberately had a shape designed for the U.S.S. Enterprise because he knew that he didn't have the budget to be able to afford landing a spaceship on a planet in every episode like the old Buck Rodgers serial movies tried, or even like the more contemporary "Lost in Space". The "transporters" were thrown in because it was very easy to implement in film even if it added a bit of "science fantasy" look to the show.

More to the point, the shape was made explicitly so it couldn't land on a planetary surface so writers were not even tempted to try. That a couple of decades later somehow the state of the art for special effects advanced enough along with the budget for doing stuff like landing on a planetary surface were made available so they could occasionally land on a planet (aka the USS Voyager and her landing pylons) is sort of remarkable.

Re:This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[Grayhand]

Ion power isn't about horse power it's about efficiency. It uses less mass and mass is the thing in short or at least limited supply. I agree the design isn't practical especially since only the wheel would have gravity. A space wheel makes more sense. I have my doubts about his budget since it actually seems very conservative. I do have to say he wasn't proposing an actual starship since the most extreme destination he mentioned was Europa. Still a long way but a fraction of the distance of even the outer planets and far from the next star. When he says current technology I have to point out no one is sure humans can survive extended stays in interplanetary space. We're talking a healthy dose of radiation. Even the space station record isn't much more than a year and he's proposing multi-year trips. Here's a bizarre proposal, it might make more sense to man it with 60 year olds. The reason is the cancer factor. Better to develop cancer from radiation exposure in your 80s than your 40s. Generally it would take a decade or two to develop so the impact would be greater on young travelers. Odds are they'd be limited to s single trip so the risk of developing normal health problems in the year or two they'd be traveling could be minimized.

Re:This is nothing like the Enterprise except ...

[dougmc]

Ion power isn't about horse power it's about efficiency.

I'm not sure sure what your point is here -- I said nothing about what ion power was or wasn't. (But I know what it is, and you're not wrong.)

My allusion was to an original series Star Trek where they Scottie mentioned ion power and got all excited about it, as it was vastly superior to the dilithium crystals (which created anti-matter somehow) that powered their own ship. The joke is that we've already figured out ion power, sort of -- it's antimatter (and fusion and other things) power that evades us.

As for protecting against radiation, they could add lots of shielding. Charged particle radiation could be deflected by a large magnetic field (superconducting magnets around the outer edge? Being in space would make it easier to keep them cold), maybe, with EM radiation blocked by lots of mass. Making the ship more massive would make it slower, but you could give it a sphere shape and have the crew spend most of its time in the very center, with all the equipment and fuel and stuff surrounding them and adding some shielding by itself. If the engines release lots of radiation, have them far away from the crew quarters -- perhaps miles away, connected with a boom. (Niven's science fiction world has where the engines pull the crew quarters with many mile long tethers -- but that would require being able to aim the exhaust very precisely.)

As for using old people, considering that the ship would cost a trillion or so dollars to make, we're not going to man it with people likely to die or have other medical problems during a mission. Instead, we'll minimize the risks as much as practical, then tell people the risks remaining and ask for volunteers. I doubt they'd have a problem finding young, healthy, appropriately skilled people to volunteer for a mission that could result in their death from cancer (and many other things) if it meant they'd be the first people to go to Europa, for example.

Size...

[Junta]

and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.

Not according to the picture. The picture depicts it as longer than Burj Khalifa is tall. That means it is about 3 times bigger than the enterprise was supposed to be.

Re:Size...

[garyebickford]

I don't know about planetary ships, but for various reasons I won't get into here, interstellar ships are likely to be measured in kiilometers - numbers like 10-40 km come up often.

Or, as my sig used to say, "Space is big, really big! Better pack a lunch." :)

build a space elevator and use it to get the parts

[Joe_Dragon]

build a space elevator and use it to get the parts to space and build the ship there.

I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[Qbertino]

Seriously, is this a joke? The very first thing I'd chuck away when building a star ship inspired by Star Trek is the design of the Enterprise. There are countless way better, suitable and even more realistic space ship designs than that fragile contraption.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[Black Parrot]

Seriously, is this a joke? The very first thing I'd chuck away when building a star ship inspired by Star Trek is the design of the Enterprise. There are countless way better, suitable and even more realistic space ship designs than that fragile contraption.

For starts, I'm guessing that an ion drive would have to be mounted along (or symmetrical about) the ship's center of gravity.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[Reemi]

Yes, let's build a cube.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[am 2k]

Yes, I'd go for a Defiant class star ship. That should also be way cheaper.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[rgbrenner]

That's why you don't design spaceships. The Enterprise had a great design because it was aerodynamic.. one of the most important things in space.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[roman_mir]

Yes, aerodynamic and also it's like a flying saucer, but with a tail, it's great.

--

If I was building a space ship, I'd probably have it be a giant rock, so that it would have its own gravity and could hold an atmosphere and people could walk on it without falling off and things wouldn't need to be screwed and glued on to stay on though.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[a_hanso]

"If I was building a space ship, I'd probably have it be a giant rock, so that it would have its own gravity and could hold an atmosphere and people could walk on it without falling off and things wouldn't need to be screwed and glued on to stay on though."

-- said God and it was so. He called this rock a planet. And God saw that it was all good.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[roman_mir]

-- said God and it was so. He called this rock a planet. And God saw that it was all good.

- thank you, but call me Roman.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[rgbrenner]

Um.. the borg cube also travels through subspace.. so it obviously doesn't need to be aerodynamic.

Re:I'd ditch the hull design first thing.

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

And use old tennis players as the crew. I wonder if Bjorn Borg is available?

Re:build a space elevator and use it to get the pa

[sphealey]

= = = = build a space elevator and... = = = =

Soon as that 1000x-stronger-than-spider-silk cable material is invented, the electrical charge problems are solved, and the people living under the fall path of a broken cable accept the risk we are good to go. Just a few minor engineering obstacles to be sure.

sPh

Kickstarter

[SolusSD]

Sounds like a good kickstarter project. I'll chip in.

Power of Persuasion

[brunes69]

Actually, having NASA embark to "building the actual Enterprise" might be just what the US needs to get funding back into space. You have to get the public on board. In the 60's rockets were cool and new, now they are old hat. "Why do we need to do that, we did it before".

And it would be retarded to do so.

[Lumpy]

The enterprise is horribly designed. Honestly it's good for Skiffy but it sucks in reality. This is where this guy falls on his face hard. There are other designs that real engineers have came up with that would work better, even just a long round tube is a lot better design than this.

Plus building something that huge is ridiculousness, unless you are thinking ARK ship for people to leave earth and never return, but even then the enterprise is the worst possible design you could use.

what is next? let's lift the Yamamoto off the ocean floor and fit engines to it to turn it into a space battleship?

Re:And it would be retarded to do so.

[binarylarry]

You jest, but perhaps we could use the Yamamato to build some type of "Yamamato Cannon" that could be mounted to this new space ship. It could be useful if they ironically get attacked by Klingons while trekking through space.

BTE-Dan ?

[Black Parrot]

It should be BAD-Dan, as in "Be A Dork".

Put it in real world dollars

[Grayhand]

We just spent that much getting revenge for 911 and the meter is still running. By the time we pull out and add up all the benefits to soldiers the number I heard was 3 to 5 trillion. The point is just what we spent to date in the middle east would fund the project and which is likely to yield more benefits? It would even end up quasi commercial because most first world countries would sign on to have their scientists on board and pay to have probes launched. In the end it could pay for itself and it could become a source for locating and harvesting rare earth materials that are in short supply here on Earth. Cut 50 billion out of the military budget which isn't hard and there's your funding.

Sans warp drive

[davydagger]

what made the enterprise so exciting was "Warp Speed" accomplished by a "Warp Drive"....

so, for the tune of $1 Trillion dollars, why re-create a ship, who's entire design merits is based on asthetics of Hollywood, and without its most important part, the faster than light "Warp Drive" and self sustaining matter/anti-matter reaction that can power it almost indefinately.

While I am a big fan of the TV shows and movies, and I very much for space exploration, this is bogus. Step back into reality dude. A real life model of the USS enterprise is nothing more than a gimmick. At the cost of $1 trillion its an unaffordable gimmick for ANYONE.

Mabey when space technology advances in 50-60 years, if it does(space age is OVER), it'd make a very nice concept for a space cruise liner. One giant gimmick, where you dress the crew up in star trek inspired uniforms, and treat the guests to a retro-futuristic ride through space with 60s music and dance parties, stage acting, and gimmicky goodness.

Project Icarus

[Anonymous Coward]

A slightly more realistic run at sending a probe to a nearby star.

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/

Life imitates art?

[dkleinsc]

This seems like either the deeds of mighty Captain Pirk of Star Wreck fame, or the "invention" of transparant aluminum.

Cool!

[Lord Lode]

Now we just need to find somebody with the money...

by comparison

[StripedCow]

Time to build starship: 20 years.
Time to reach nearest star: 10,000 years (*)

Based on these numbers, wouldn't it be better to let technology progress a little bit further?

(*) IANAA, not an astronomer

Re:by comparison

[SlashdotWanker]

possibly, I believe it would be better to spend the money on something that we can all dream about instead of F-35s or doomsday devices. There may not be a habitable earth left by the time we have superlight technologies.

Re:by comparison

[mehrotra.akash]

If tech becomes significantly better, the next ship can just pick up the people in this ship on the way

Re:by comparison

[Dutchmaan]

Time to build starship: 20 years. Time to reach nearest star: 10,000 years (*)

Based on these numbers, wouldn't it be better to let technology progress a little bit further?

(*) IANAA, not an astronomer

Cost to build starship? I think that one should be right up there with the other two.

Forget the Enterprise

[dead_user]

I'd rather a Six, from Tripping the Rift.

Physics!

[pcjunky]

The Faster than light thing is a problem as no one knows how to make it work. Discovery one (2001 Space Odyssey) may be possible though. Sans Hal. Maybe Siri could substitute.

Re:Physics!

[ArmchairGeneral]

IMO we'll find a way to travel faster than light. It seems for almost every barrier that is in front of us we tend to find ways around it.

Re:Physics!

[rubycodez]

where are all the space aliens, then, if faster-than-light travel is possible in this universe? The lightspeed barrier pretty much explains the Fermi paradox.

Large spacecraft design -- make them spherical

[benjfowler]

I think if I were an engineer, looking to built large megastructures in space, with sufficient shielding for human occupants, I think I would look at a sphere first. Minimum surface area to enclose a given volume. Build from the inside out. Controllable rotational gravity; outer compartments are filled with water and storage; further in, put people and living space; further in still, put a radiation storm shelter (humans can cope with microgravity for short periods with no ill effects). Besides, if you were building a spacecraft not designed for reentry, there would be no need to make it aerodynamic.

Perhaps we should be taking our inspiration from the Death Star, not the Starship Enterprise.

Re:Large spacecraft design -- make them spherical

[PPH]

For constant gravity from rotation, consider a cylinder. The inside surface being the living quarters. Much like the cylinders in Rendevous with Rama.

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.

I think I'll wait for the elevator

[howardd21]

http://www.space.com/14656-japanese-space-elevator-2050-proposal.html

Re:I think I'll wait for the elevator

[Teancum]

The problem with space elevators is that some sort of "unobtanium" must be found that can handle the tensile strength issues with the primary cables holding up the elevator. It is not a solved engineering problem and there is a suggestion that the raw physics of the endeavor may not even make such a device possible.

I think I'll be riding in a scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise before the space elevator is built, but I guess that is my own opinion of the thing.

Obligatory XKCD

[am 2k]

Researcher Translation

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[codemachine]

The mouse over text is especially apt here.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Original plan was for Enterprise to land

[dwheeler]

Wikipedia, the source of all possible wisdom, says on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek) that "According to The Making of Star Trek, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's original plan did not include transporters, instead calling for characters to land the starship itself. However, this would have required unfeasible and unaffordable sets and model filming, as well as episode running time spent while landing, taking off, etc. The shuttlecraft was the next idea, but when filming began, the full-sized shooting model was not ready. Transporters were devised as a less expensive alternative, achieved by a simple fade-out/fade-in of the subject. Transporters first appear in the original pilot episode "The Cage". The transporter special effect, before being done using computer animation, was created by turning a slow-motion camera upside down and photographing some backlit shiny grains of aluminium powder that were dropped between the camera and a black background." Citation given is Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek the real story, 1996, ISBN 0-671-00974-5.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[SuricouRaven]

You missed a plan: Global unification. Either peacefully (A few centuries of globalised communications and travel might do it) or not-so-peacefully (Nuke 'em all, then disband the military).

Enterprise

[shoehornjob]

Great plans for a really big space station maybe but at a cost of 1 trillion I seriously doubt this will come to fruition any time soon. Pipe dreams.

Isn't anybody reading between the lines?

[sp4ni3l]

This guy is proposing something using one of the most powerfull images / analogies we have as his inspiration. Yes , the design might be horrible, and there are a lot of reasons why some elements of his proposal would not work, frankly speaking we don't know! There are also a lot of the elements would work! If you look at his roadmap he is proposing 11 years of research and within those 11 years technologies are proposed, prototypes build etc, etc, etc. Then there is the moment of final ship design, not before! What he is envisioning is a huge platform (the amount of room we have will make it possible to use this for all kinds of things) which we can use to really explore our solar system and use the industry and momentum that this creates to get a sustainable program of the ground which will make us an true spacefaring species. He is not saying we should leap ahead and only do this when we have the 1G drive or when the Warp drive is invented. He is saying we should start with what we already are capable off and learn from it. Any argument that we have other problems which we as humanity should solve first (hunger, desease, war) are all true, but that would mean everybody should also stop doing other things, like going on vacation and buying this just to big car, etc, etc. Just think about how many launch sites we would need to get te stuff to build this Enterprise up there and where these launchsites are best located. Also think about how many jobs this creates and inventions it requires and what that does to solve te forementioned problems. There is nothing more powerfull then a common goal I for one applaud the effort he put in here and he gets my vote. I sincerely think that we as humans should make the trip. Other proposals like sending probes is like watching a football match on the television. Yes it is very exciting and maybe cheaper, but it is no where near the experience you get by actually being in the stadium! (when his website is back up a.k.a. can handle the load again i am going to read further on what his thoughts are)

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[tqk]

You missed a plan: Global unification. Either peacefully (A few centuries of globalised communications and travel might do it) or not-so-peacefully (Nuke 'em all, then disband the military).

You forgot about the Eugenics Wars. Does Kahn (from ST:TOS) ring any bells?

I'm with Malcolm Reynolds these days, so no irons in this fire.

"We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do, ..."

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[king neckbeard]

Pacifism loses out, but the bar isn't "a large military capable of projecting power globally,", it's "annoying enough to not bother taking over." The US population has enough guns already without the military for that, particularly since there's not all that much worth taking in the first place.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[madhi19]

Actually by now Kahn should have already exiled himself to space!

Let Kill the Romantic

[Roachie]

... notions of space-faring humans buzzing around the universe. We are a long way from being able to feasibly accomplish this

If one were really interested in expanding the breadth of human knowledge of the universe we would dump the proposed $1T (cheap! ) we would spend in building some sci-fi jackoffs wet dream of a 'starship' and invest in more probes, bigger telescopes , and what am I forgetting...... oh, yea, education.

Only $142/person?!?

[pubwvj]

That's cheap. Where do I send my $1,000? I'm sending extra to make up for those without vision.

Re:build a space elevator and use it to get the pa

[HiThere]

Well, we have cables strong enough to build elevators on the Moon and on Mars. And on neither place is there a problem will people living underneath the fall path. The electrical charge problems don't exist on the Moon. (Not sure about Mars.)

But the stable ecosystem problem means that we can't support people out there yet, even so. That's the real major problem. Submarines aren't a good example, as even at the extreme they come up for air every month or so, and they've got plentiful access to water, so if worst came to worst they could electrolyze it for Oxygen. (Don't know if they do, but they *could*.)

A stable habitat implies, among other things, that it can supply it's own food, air, and water from locally available resources at a rate sufficient to keep it stable. So far we can't do that unless air and water are readilly available externalities. (Given ammonia, Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and water as available externalities (comets, Jovian orbit asteroids, etc.), we need LOTS!! of energy to convert them into food, air, and water. And that's if we move out to where those resources are available. Closer in asteroids are dry, because the volatiles have evaporated. So the ecosystem needs to be really TIGHT. Transporting the stuff up form Earth is not only expensive, it is a vital dependency that makes planning to live there unreasonably dangerous. Politics that you have nothing to do with can kill you without warning, and even by accident.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[chrb]

Yes, we do. Without a military our civilization would fall to a more aggressive civilization. A military is necessary to create the environment where your civilization can do something other than be a servant to another.

Interesting, then, that the Founding Fathers envisaged a United States without a standing army...

“A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen” - James Madison

Re:Small A will get you there too.

[garyebickford]

I will just add that, if I recall correctly that acceleration would get you fairly close to lightspeed before exiting the solar system. Once you get above some significant fraction of light speed the real issue is not dying as a result of the relatively-accelerated particles the ship would be running into. So the front of the ship might have to be something like a small (100 meter?) water-ice asteroid that gradually ablates as it runs into stuff. Then, halfway to the next star, flip the ship around and you have another ball of ice on the other end.

A Tamarian might reply

[paiute]

Building an Enterprise without a warp drive would be like building a Titanic powered by galley slaves.

First Things First. Starships Later.

[quarkscat]

Let's presume that building an advanced technology starship is the ultimate goal, and we don't have that technology yet. Let's also presume that no one will repeal the laws of gravity any time soon. The prerequisites to starship construction wouldn't rely upon technology that is currently out of reach. The premise is that building and launching any starship from a low gravity environment is far preferable to launching it from Earth. The first of those "baby steps" towards building starships is developing the technology to perform robotic asteroid mining. Low orbit robotic refining, smelting, and construction would be the next step.

Rather than building a space station / shipyard in Low Earth Orbit, build it closer to the asteroid source of the materials in Low Mars Orbit. That location also puts mankind closer to the water & carbon-based fuel resources we already know exist on the moons of Mars and Saturn. Even supposing that it takes 30 years to get that combined space station & dockyard built, it doesn't preclude parallel scientific discovery of technologies that would make realist travel between the stars possible. But it would give humanity the infrastructure necessary to build such starships, even if we don't know what those technologies will be or what the starship design would ultimately look like. We already have a good idea of what a LEO / LMO space station / dockyard would look like if it is to be human habitable -- a vast spinning wheel, with spaceship docking and construction "dry-dock" near the hub.

The construction of Moon bases and Mars bases for human habitation would go more quickly with a space-based source of materials, rather than fighting Earth's gravity like we are doing now. Extraterrestrial sources of necessary raw materials would break any reliance upon Moon or Mars based resources such as water and carbon-based fuels for anything other than short-term emergency measures would be a good thing. Governments waste far too much money on useless military junk that predisposes those governments to view every problem as a raised nail when their only tool is a hammer. Not surprisingly, most of the USA's Military Industrial Complex has also been involved in space exploration. The money is there for such a vast & bold enterprise -- it's only a matter of political will to refocus our efforts & monies on space exploration & construction rather than destruction.

Let's get it done ... beginning tomorrow morning.

What a dumb idea

[shiftless]

Why in the world would we do that?

There is only so much room on this rock for humanity to spread out and multiply. Eventually, when resources are too short, wars happen....in this age, on a global scale.

So how does helping more people survive and multiply help? You think these poor peoples from Africa are magically going to discover civilization just because you airlifted pallets of food in? You think that homeless bum on the corner is going to quit being a homeless bum cause you gave him a quarter? No, they are in the situation they are in because of who they are and the choices they made.

If you want to waste a trillion dollars helping the helpless, by all means, do so...but don't spend any of MY money to do it. I have better things to spend it on....like building a bunker so my family will survive the next World War.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, why in the world would we do that? Giving the average homeless bum a quarter would be a useless idea to solve his or her problems.

More likely they need psychiatric help. A quarter's worth of anti-psychotics would help more.

Just like the poor people in Africa don't need airlifted food, they need other solutions.

Thanks for noticing it's just not about ineffectual solutions, but about finding the problem and identifying it.

Much like treating somebody for hemophilia isn't to leech their blood, putting out a house fire usually involves pouring water on it, not gasoline, or any other analogies you care to name.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Imrik]

Oddly enough, helping more people survive tends to lower population growth.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

you seriously think africans are poor because of their personal decisions and compare them to homeless in rich countries? and get upvoted for that? woah.
if you were born african and poor you'd probably be dead by now. you'd probably never have had a computer or you know, sufficient food every week.

but that's ok because it would have been who you and your personal decisions.
disgusting at best.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Immerman]

Huh, you mean the Africans chose to have their (largely democratic) governments overthrown and replaced with British pillaging engines? Then when the British were finally kicked out the governments weren't actually replaced, only the people at the helm. Actually changing government at an institutional level is not an easy thing, especially when the vast bulk of the populace lacks the education to understand how (method, if not magnitude) they're being exploited.

But I'll agree, feeding people doesn't seem to help outside of short-term crises, in fact it can makes things worse by destroying local food markets and driving farmers out of business (potentially turning a short term crisis into an ongoing problem). Fair Trade exports have a related effect, why would a farmer grow food for the local market when he can grow much more profitable goods for the export market?

Education on the other hand does seem to help, as does free access to birth control and family planning education. It's not that hard for someone living on the knife edge of poverty to understand that they can give a couple kids a much better life than you can a handful, but abstinence is a tough pill to swallow. Of course education especially has it's detractors - every tin-hat dictator and religious power monger realizes their power depends on keeping the populace ignorant and downtrodden, and many won't hesitate to stoop to violent rhetoric to incite the populace against their would-be liberators. Still, there's plenty of places where that's not the case, and as we do what we can there word tends to spread. You can only keep people under your thumb so long before they start noticing that their neighbors who did listen to those vile, evil, disease-spreading infidels are actually looking a lot healthier and happier than they used to.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Dcnjoe60]

Huh, you mean the Africans chose to have their (largely democratic) governments overthrown and replaced with British pillaging engines? Then when the British were finally kicked out the governments weren't actually replaced, only the people at the helm. Actually changing government at an institutional level is not an easy thing, especially when the vast bulk of the populace lacks the education to understand how (method, if not magnitude) they're being exploited.

But I'll agree, feeding people doesn't seem to help outside of short-term crises, in fact it can makes things worse by destroying local food markets and driving farmers out of business (potentially turning a short term crisis into an ongoing problem). Fair Trade exports have a related effect, why would a farmer grow food for the local market when he can grow much more profitable goods for the export market?

Education on the other hand does seem to help, as does free access to birth control and family planning education. It's not that hard for someone living on the knife edge of poverty to understand that they can give a couple kids a much better life than you can a handful, but abstinence is a tough pill to swallow. Of course education especially has it's detractors - every tin-hat dictator and religious power monger realizes their power depends on keeping the populace ignorant and downtrodden, and many won't hesitate to stoop to violent rhetoric to incite the populace against their would-be liberators. Still, there's plenty of places where that's not the case, and as we do what we can there word tends to spread. You can only keep people under your thumb so long before they start noticing that their neighbors who did listen to those vile, evil, disease-spreading infidels are actually looking a lot healthier and happier than they used to.

Not that I am promoting abstinance in any way, but I do want to point out that prior to the 1960s, it was the only way available and it seemed to work pretty well over all. With only abstinance, birthrates in countries that worked on reducing poverty and increasing education still fell. Today's modern methods may be much more effective than absitnance, but my point is that even abstinance is the only option it doesn't negate the effects of poverty reduction and education.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Dcnjoe60]

Oddly enough, helping more people survive tends to lower population growth.

That is what all the research shows, whether on animals or humans. The higher the survial rate, or attainment of adulthood (not just sexual maturity), the lower the birthrate becomes.. Nature figured this all out long before man picked up the first stone tool.

Re:What a dumb idea

[Boronx]

As long as they don't come here and take our jobs! It's the damndest thing. They get to a rich country and all they want to do is work work work work work.

Re:What a dumb idea

[shiftless]

U mad bro?

Re:What a dumb idea

[tqk]

Much like treating somebody for hemophilia isn't to leech their blood, putting out a house fire usually involves pouring water on it, not gasoline, or any other analogies you care to name.

I'd like to point out, Red Adair put out fires with dynamite. Josef Stalin and Hitler expended quite a bit of effort on the over-population problem too.

We humans can get pretty inventive when faced with a problem. Solutions come in all shades from black through white, and there's often some nutbar standing around thinking any number of them makes sense to them.

Re:What a dumb idea

[tqk]

Not that I am promoting abstinance in any way, but I do want to point out that prior to the 1960s, it was the only way available and it seemed to work pretty well over all.

"French Letters" have a fairly long history, you know? Even Catholics enjoyed some success with coitus interuptus. If I were starting over in my teens, I'd be expending a *lot* more effort on aural sex instead of worrying myself to death as to whether my SO at that moment was impregnated (with all the horrifying baggage that goes along with that for everyone concerned).

Re:What a dumb idea

[lennier]

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

Why in the world would we do that?

Because well-fed and educated brains are much tastier, and they're a sutainable food source if we manage them correctly.

Regarding Mars, you're obviously one of the recent nursery hatchlings - podded sometime in the seventeenth century AD, perhaps? What heady years those were. Every few millenia one of us inevitably raises the question, "Why don't we return to the Old Planet?" And cooler, wiser brain-tentacles wave back the same old answer: because we foolishly drank all the blood from the bipedal races of Barsoom: too fast, too greedily, and without proper attention to farming practices. That's why we migrated here, and that's why we plan to stay, and that's why our atmosphere conversion stacks are busy raising the CO2 percentage as fast as the humans will allow.

Relax. The Crimson Octo-Squid Empress is well aware of your impatience, and finds potential challengers make a nice between-meals snack.

Re:What a dumb idea

[lennier]

If I were starting over in my teens, I'd be expending a *lot* more effort on aural sex

It doesn't have to be that loud, you know.

Re:What a dumb idea

[tqk]

If I were starting over in my teens, I'd be expending a *lot* more effort on aural sex

It doesn't have to be that loud, you know.

What I really meant was Auroral! You know, dark night under the stars, coronal mass ejections plowing into the atmosphere, Northern Lights, ...

Yeah, I didn't think anyone'd be foolish enough to fall for that. s/aural/oral/ Sigh. Drat. There's too damned many homonyms out there to keep track of them all on not enough sleep.

Re:What a dumb idea

[tqk]

[I'm] from Africa. There were no democracies before colonialism ... or during. They only came after. Everyone before that was, "might equals right".

I've been in Africa (Sudan). Nice people; polite as hell. I didn't want to leave.

So, you're saying Africa's history is a lot like Europe's, the America's, Asia's, ... I agree. Democracy's over-rated, IMO. We all ought to be able to come up with something *a lot* better. At best, all it does is keep us from killing more of each other faster.

[If you ever find yourself in Khartoum, look up Ramiz Muniere and buy him some karkade for me. I'll pay you back.]

Re:What a dumb idea

[tqk]

Woof. Whatever it is that you've ingested, I think I want some. What's the safe/reasonable dosage? :-O

Re:What a dumb idea

[cmarkn]

The only thing that is going to help many of the poor people is moving them out of the stinking desert. As long as they live in places where they barely fed themselves in the good years and starve in the frequent years of drought or locust plague, they are never going to be self supporting. But where can they move? The better lands are already full, and they, being the poor, don't have the money to buy better land.

Re:What a dumb idea

[cmarkn]

Thank you. It's nice to have someone who has studied the subject in the discussion.

Re:What a dumb idea

[monkeythug]

Strictly speaking, I wouldn't think that it was abstinence as such that worked, except maybe to an extent in Catholic communities, so much as with increased education people started learning about the Rhythm method. The Rhythm method isn't a particularly reliable form of birth control by today's standards, but it's still much better than none at all.

Cute.

[milath]

I say, as someone who didn't grow up masturbating to Uhura or that green alien chick in my formative years that if we somehow ever came up with 1 trillion dollars to do anything in this country that didn't involve bankrolling financial meltdowns or bailing out some industry, we throw half of it at NASA (which is nearly more than they got in the entirety of the program) and give them a goal of getting astronauts on Mars in 10 years, with the promise of the other half once the astronauts return safely.

Then they can start building whatever pie in the sky BS this guy cooked up. Or hopefully come up with something more realistic and less based on watching too many episodes of some 40 year old sci-fi show.

Seeing as how none of this is going to happen, and the above also seems much more realistic to me, this article and idea just seems like mental masturbation.

If only...

[froggymana]

If only he could create a website incapable of being slashdotted.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Teancum]

They also envisioned a citizenry that was well trained in the martial arts at all levels and a very active component of the national military made up of state-level militias. Throughout most of American history, the national military was made up of a small core of a modest national army (usually about 30,000 soldiers during peacetime) supplemented with state organized regiments that would grow or shrink as needed. This continued until the end of World War II, when the national army started to dominate the state militias.

Standards of training, uniforms, and other "regulations" were to come from the national government (and is spelled out explicitly in the U.S. Constitution), but the idea was more of a highly trained citizenry more along how the Swiss Army is organized.

It is useful to know that Switzerland has been able to defend itself against much larger and more powerful countries, had two world wars rage all about them, yet never had to either capitulate to the demands of the major powers about them nor even get involved in any of those conflicts. Most citizens of Switzerland are armed (at least have weapons in their homes) because they are also members of that nation's military in some capacity, even though they are on "reserve status".

That was also the point of the 2nd Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, where armed citizens were expected to take the time to learn how to use weapons properly and there was even an assumption that nearly every citizens would take the time to go through at least some sort of military training. Even today I am a member of the "unorganized militia" in the state where I live (well... I was.... I'm a bit too old for that stuff now and the state constitution only requires people under 40 to be in that militia). Other states have similar clauses in their state constitutions and legal codes. How "organized" that "unorganized militia" actually can be is certainly subject to dispute, but it was never envisioned to have America be defenseless.

A cost of one trillion dollars?

[PsychicX]

That's going to be one really, really big Kickstarter project.

Priorities

[Johann Lau]

What are we gonna tell the InterGalactic Council of Ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws one of her babies into the dumpster? Huh? How are we going to explain that to the space people? How are we going to let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half and hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out that it's just a local custom that over 80,000,000 women in the third world had their clitoris' forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasures, so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?

-- George Carlin

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question - is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say 'Hey! Don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.' And we...kill those people. Ha ha ha. 'Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings, and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace.

-- Bill Hicks

Now that is aspiration. But building an ugly spaceship for no purpose, just because it featured in a TV show that didn't even have much to say -- WTF? That is so lame, I actually got dumber just by coming across this story, kthxbye.

History has shown

[Dcnjoe60]

History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.

How one eliviates poverty and educates the poor is another issue. It has already been shown that drop shipping food doesn't work except in times of extreme famine. It has also been shown that giving financial aid to corrupt governments does not work either. But then again, neither does propping up corrupt regimes corporate and political reasons.

Re:History has shown

[melchoir55]

History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.

Poor people don't increase the odds for the success of their children by having a ton of children. That behavior decreases the odds of success in a society like our own. The reason better educated people have less children is because they understand having less children is better for the children, the parents, and society at large. They understand this because they are educated. If poor people had less children it would increase the chances of the family creating self-sustaining wealth, because the family could spend less money. It would also increase the amount of resources available for any particular child (including parental attention, food, books, computers, instructors, etc.).

The poor people I have known who habitually reproduce did not do it because they thought it was good for the success of their genes. They did it because they didn't know any better. It didn't occur to them that there was an alternative to having sex and popping out a kid every once in a while by accident.

Re:History has shown

[Boronx]

It's because wealthy, educated women have more autonomy over their own bodies than poor, ignorant women and women generally don't want to have billions of kids while there's always plenty of men who think otherwise.

Who is BTEDan?

[shadowrat]

"A systems engineer and electrical engineer with 30 years at a fortune 500 company" that could be a lot of people, but what if it was the Woz? You naysayers wouldn't be saying nay then!

Start building it

[NetNinja]

If we start building it the engine to power it will be finished and it can be retrofitted.

not building it will take that much longer.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Trahloc]

You must live in Phoenix Arizona if you think there isn't anything worth taking in the USA. Living on the coast I can totally see why someone would want to take us over, it's beautiful here.

Re:With all countries of the world on board we...

[Ash-Fox]

...could do this in a year or two. Wake up people! We've had uber technology that has gone un-used and forgotten from the 80's for christ's sake. People just have to work together, understand the risks, eliminate all the 'red-tape' and do this as a world instead of just countries. It's not hard, open your mind.

I've opened my mind to your logic. Let's get 100 mothers to make a baby in one month.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Yes, we do. Without a military our civilization would fall to a more aggressive civilization. A military is necessary to create the environment where your civilization can do something other than be a servant to another.

Interesting, then, that the Founding Fathers envisaged a United States without a standing army...

âoeA standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happenâ - James Madison

It should be noted that "military" and "standing army" are not actually synonymous.

There's a reason why we have traditionally had a larger peacetime Navy than Army (up till WW2)...

You ain't got a thing...

[matunos]

...if you ain't got that [warp drive].

Re:Error establishing a database connection

[Ash-Fox]

If you can't build and host a proper website, how are you going to build and operate a freakin' spaceship?

Clearly he needs to throw money at the problem.

cold war was the only thing driving the space race

[decora]

congress did not spend that money because it was 'cool', they spent it because the soviet union sent up a satellite called 'sputnik' that proved the theory they could rain bombs down on us.

before sputnik, there was essentially no space program. zero, nada, zilch. nobody gave a shit except a few dreamers and engineers who were discredit for wanting to waste taxpayers money on pipe dreams - we didnt need space, we needed bombers and nukes to kill the 'commies' in the korean war and elsewhere.

(of course, the soviet chief designer Korolev, was actually a starry eyed dreamer, who managed to fool the generals into building the space missiles... and Kruschev agreed because there was no way they could compete in conventional warfare due to cost... but thats another story)

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[lightknight]

It's...beautiful elsewhere as well. We do not have a monopoly on beauty; we did, however, have the majority in shares on the freedom racket until recently.

No redundancy in the system

[Old Wolf]

The biggest reason this will never happen is that the builders spend 19.5 years and trillion(s) of dollars on it, and then one of the literally millions of components fails and the whole thing blows up. Or an opposing nation "accidentally" fires a missile at it, or terrorists blow it up. It would just be such a massive waste. Of course, nobody would be financing the project without massive insurance, and the reinsurers would charge through the roof. This is nothing like the space shuttle development where we have a few of them, or if one blows up we can build another one .

The overall ships design does not make sense...

[w4rl5ck]

... because without warp drive, there is no need to have warp pistons, so why should one build them? Just a massive waste of material.

One could as well go for a more Galactica-based design, it's quite more compact and not less intriguing.

Or, just start with solving earths problems first, as it was done in Star Trek, too. No need to travel to Mars when two or three or four stupid guys are clutching to the triggers to blow all of the civilized world into oblivion.

Oh yeah and, sure, nobody will ever try to use the laser for anything but digging into moons surface ;)

Still, I somehow like the idea, but we should really wait for Zefram Cochrane, will just make a lot more sense, and 2063 not that far ahead anyway. Heck that's only 51 years and one world war, should be OK right?

Karl Marx was right

[Boronx]

Why do we all need jobs if it's possible to make all the shit we need with fewer people? Maybe what the world needs is not more jobs but equitable distribution of corporate ownership. If you have everything you need, maybe you shouldn't work all the time. Maybe you should read a book or write one, or work on your own non-profitable projects?

Re:Karl Marx was right

[History's Coming To]

Who's going to do the minimum wage jobs when they don't have to? We already have this problem in the UK where it's more profitable to be unemployed than earn minimum wage, if it wasn't for immigrant workers you wouldn't be able to get a meal or a clean hotel room in some cities.

Re:Karl Marx was right

[Boronx]

You might take a free market approach to such jobs. If you can't pay enough for someone to actually want to do it, they maybe it doesn't need to get done that badly.

Re:Karl Marx was right

[Coz]

Or mooch off the rest of society, or spend your time scheming to increase your own power and influence instead of working your way up in society while having to provide for your own needs and those of your family.

Thanks for playing, troll.

Re:Karl Marx was right

[cmarkn]

But there is another side to this, that there are jobs that need to be done, but it aren't worth paying even minimum wage. But instead of creating more part-time jobs for kids, these things either go undone or divert higher-paid workers from more productive work.These give you either lower quality or higher prices, and fewer jobs. Those are the hidden costs of minimum wage.

Re:Karl Marx was right

[Boronx]

Let's pretend everybody has to work their butts off even though agriculture and manufacturing are incredibly efficient. Let's structure society so that people have to slave their lives away at utterly pointless jobs just so folks like you can feel like they aren't moochers.

You are and your ideas are unassailable.

We need the money.

[kikito]

Banks need that trillion to "get saved", you insensitive clod.

Not realistic

[firecode]

It will be much easier to gene-engineer humans to better fit into specifications of space and spaceships than to create spaceships for the current form of human being for interstellar travel:

1) too high mass/much smaller size
2) need for oxygen and food (direct use of electricity/solar power as energy source?)
3) need to move? (just brains connected to spaceship computers?)
4) ability live in zero g, recover from radiation, handle low temperatures, ability to hibernate etc

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[downhole]

The world and the nature of military technology has changed a lot since then. In the Founder's days, all you need is to have all of the regular citizens own guns and have some level of training. Get them all together in one place and give 'em some uniforms, and you have an army that's comparable to any other at the time. Nowadays, the big three have changed the game: Aircraft, Armor, and Artillery. If you don't have them, then your army is a half-assed guerrilla force compared to a real army, and will be crushed in the blink of an eye. They're all incredibly expensive, have to be operated and maintained by highly trained crews, and have to be operated in close coordination with each other. There's no way to have them be distributed among a bunch of regular joes; you have to have a standing army.

Not to mention the need to have a Navy...

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[downhole]

If by "defend itself" you mean go along with pretty much whatever the Axis powers wanted on all important issues under constant threat of invasion, then yes. Neutrality gives you the wonderful choice of supplying arms to the countries invading Russia and murdering Jews, or being invaded and occupied for however long the enemy feels like.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Coz]

And most of those founding fathers were there when the US Navy was established to protect our trade and coasts, and agreed to it. As well as the Marine Corps, our first "expeditionary" capability derived from the Navy.

We had an advantage - we weren't in Europe surrounded by a bunch of historically hostile Powers. We had Canada to the north, with negligible offensive capability, and to the south and west were bordered by natives and weak colonies. A standing army wasn't needed. By 1812, we had one and we'd keep it forever - we realized the limitations of the "well-regulated militia" Teancum refers to.

It wasn't that long ago we had three powers openly espousing their intention to dominate their neighbors, and then the world - Germany, Japan, and the USSR. WWII reduced the open militarism of the first two, and the following decades of Cold War, however expensive and bloody in proxy fights, didn't not result in global domination by the USSR (or, by the USA, which has NEVER espoused a mission to dominate our neighbors, Monroe Doctrine notwhithstanding). We're not that far from military brutalism in the world today - just look at Sudan. The armies of the so-called Western powers exist mostly to defend themselves by deterring others from frontal warfare, and are succeeding, as shown by the fact that terrorism is the weapon of choice by hostile parties, instead of frontal warfare.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Coz]

"didn't not" == "did not" - hate when I catch that kind of thing after hitting "Submit"

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Teancum]

Why should a reserve army be necessarily a rag-tag bunch of soldiers? They can have armored equipment, special forces, and other elite units.

The U.S. Army is relying even now upon such units, and it wouldn't even be possible for the U.S. Army to conduct operations without the state militias. This comment doesn't even seem to acknowledge what is currently being done in that regard.

"Weekend soliders" can and do perform a great service to the country. I'm just pointing out how that might be improved so the fears of a standing army can be mitigated and be more in line with how the founding fathers of America originally envisioned the role of state militias. BTW, the current term is "National Guard" instead of a state militia, but there is also nothing precluding states from organizing other units outside of the National Guard force as well, other than the huge amount of federal money pouring into states that employ national guard units.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Teancum]

Considering that every other country next to Switzerland fell under the direct control of the Nazi German government, it isn't an accident that they stayed neutral. I guess the same could be said about Sweden (who has been similarly accused of capitulating to German demands during WWII).

My point is that these two countries both used a similar kind of reserve military system which made any military campaign against either one of these countries to be something that was a bigger hassle than the benefits gained from conquest... thus they were largely spared the effects of the wars of the 20th Century. Yes, it wasn't perfect, and they needed to make some diplomatic concessions, but they certainly fared much better than Holland and Luxlembourg.

Geography was also a component for both Sweden and Switzerland. I'm just suggesting that the armies of these countries put together in the fashion that they have trained their soldiers made them substantially less appealing military targets than many of their neighbors. It was state militia groups like these that also convinced Napoleon III that an invasion of America was a particular awful idea (something that was contemplated... see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Civil_War)

can u smell what the rock is cooking?

[villain222]

Can you smell the crowdfunding? Jabroney! Not sure about that spelling.

We're no where near warp drive

[ToddInSF]

And teleportation technology is basically non existent.

We have no artificial gravity tech.

LMAO Yeah right!

[GameboyRMH]

A ship that blows through the light barrier like a supercar through speed limits, has inertial dampers and some kind of non-centrifuge-based artificial gravity so that your tea won't be spilled in the process, carries enough fuel to do it for months on end...and that's not even getting into the transporters, replicators, holodecks and energy weapons on board.

If we could build anything from near-future hard sci-fi in 20 years I'd be amazed.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[iphinome]

They had artillery back then and found it quite useful. Though I'll admit making an operating a cannon doesn't take the same level of expertise as a recoil-less rifle.

Hope and dreams

[jitterman]

What ever happened to being enthusiastic about a dream realized, one that dares to push the boundaries of what is current? Most posts here seem to be very much against this, and some with reasonable arguments as to why, but I applaud this engineer for trying to do something creative that could prove to be a test bed for technologies that we don't today have. He's combining his love of a forward-thinking creative mind's output (Roddenberry's) with his own can-do attitude. I think it would be a wonderful achievement.

There are more practical designs for spaceships

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Like a cube.

Re:Pacifism loses ...

[Trahloc]

I know I'm replying a million years later but ... Phoenix has got to be one of the ugliest places on the planet I can imagine living short of a tar pit that's on fire. Yes there are some beautiful locations in Arizona, but Phoenix specifically at best has some beautiful homes... which would be even more beautiful anywhere else, maybe even in that tarpit as the flames would look pretty badass next to a pool. That being said I have friends who live there and their mortgage/taxes vs mine .... no contest, cheap living there.

Priorities!!!

[Locke2005]

What's with all this work on an "artificial womb"??? Shouldn't an "artificial vagina" be much more important? (Especially to slashdot readers!)

Why this is a bad idea

[Locke2005]

Any first-generation starship will inevitably arrive at it's destination hundreds of year later only to discover that people that left later but with a faster drive are already there, waiting for them! (Can anybody name the science fiction stories where exactly this happened?)

Re:So?

[Locke2005]

People need to go to the stars, not to discover other life forms, but rather to give a greater chance for the survival of the species. There is always a small but finite probably that our planet or even our entire solar system could be destroyed by currently unknown phenomena... provided, of course, that we don't destroy ourselves first. Not putting all your eggs in a single basket is expensive and difficult, but it does increase the chances that at least some of the eggs will survive a catastrophe. And trust me, the history of the universe is filled with catastrophic events spaced widely in time.