Remember that project proposed by BTE-Dan? Remember how he wanted to make a real life version of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, drawing up all the necessary plans to do so? Thanks to some new DARPA funding, that dream could soon become a reality.

Sort of. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has just received $500,000 in seed money from the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence to form 100 Year Starship (100YSS). The goal of this non-governmental initiative is to facilitate human interstellar flight within the next 100 years. The independent organization works with experts across many fields–like scientists and engineers, as well as artists and entertainers–to achieve this goal.

To be fair, half a million dollars isn’t going to do much. The “proposed” Gen1 Enterprise is estimated to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion dollars. We also have to realize that Voyager 1 is only just about to become the first manmade object to leave our solar system and it has taken the probe 35 years to get to the heliosphere. To have a starship capable of transporting humans that far for that long, let alone beyond our solar system, is quite the ambitious task indeed. Voyager 1, if it maintains its current pace of 3.6AU (about 334 million miles) per year would take another 75,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our next closest star.

As an aside, the Gen1 Enterprise is intended for intrastellar (within our solar system) missions, whereas the DARPA funding is more about going much, much further. Either way, I’m sure Neil deGrasse Tyson approves of this badass idea. We just have to come up with the other $999,500,000… and well, the tech and innovation to do it.

[Source]

The post Could DARPA Make the Real USS Enterprise a Reality? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

BTE-Dan (Build The Enterprise Dan?) has published specifications for the iconic spacecraft, as well as estimations for the costs involved. He also has a mission plan and funding strategies, demonstrating that he has really thought this out. If everything goes according to plan, he said the real USS Enterprise (called the Gen1 Enterprise) could be built in as little as 20 years.

While his proposed Gen1 Enterprise will bear a resemblance to its sci-fi counterpart, its function will be a little different. This Enterprise will be a “spaceship, a space station, and a spaceport,” working in some ways similar to the current International Space Station, though BTE-Dan decries the lack of gravity on the ISS. He’s overcome it with a rotating magnetically-suspended gravity wheel in the saucer section, generating 1g. He also bemoans the “comical and primitive” toilet facilities and the cramped quarters. His Gen1 Enterprise would be home to about 1000 people.

As expensive as it sounds, Dan claims the the project would constitute only (I say only) 0.27 percent of the United States’ GDP, and would allow the construction of ever-more advanced Enterprises every 33 years. Dan claims this compares favorably to the Apollo era, when NASA’s budget averaged 0.5 percent of the country’s GDP. Further, at a spend of $40 billion per year, Dan reckons this equates to 1.1 percent of the 2012 budget.

This spaceship is not designed to “boldly go where no one has gone before.” Instead, the 1.5 GW nuclear-powered ion engine is for intra-solar system missions, reaching the Moon in 3 days and Mars in 90 days. It would not have any “faster than the speed of light” warp drives. One small step for man? One giant waste of time for mankind?

[Source]

The post Wanna Be Star Trek USS Enterprise Could Be Built for 1 Trillion, No Warp Speed appeared first on Mobile Magazine.