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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

(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

[jjeffries]

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

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

[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

[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.

actually...

[irussel]

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

Mother of all Kickstarters

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

[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]

Tar and Feather? a lot?

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?

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

[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

"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

[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.

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.

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.

[Reemi]

Yes, let's build a cube.

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: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

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/

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

Forget the Enterprise

[dead_user]

I'd rather a Six, from Tripping the Rift.

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.

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.

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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).

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 ...

[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 ...

[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

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

[Imrik]

Oddly enough, helping more people survive tends to lower population growth.

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.

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.

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.

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?