Posted on 10/29/2010 2:27:01 PM PDT by Dallas59
The director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California casually let slip mention of the 100-Year Starship recently, a new program funded by the super-secret government agency, DARPA. In a talk at San Francisco's Long Conversation conference, Simon “Pete” Worden said DARPA has $1M to spend, plus another $100,000 from NASA itself, for the program, which will initially develop a new kind of propulsion engine that will take us to Mars or beyond.
There's only one problem: The astronauts won't come back.
The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles. That’s a daunting prospect, partly because of the ethical dilemma, and partly because it may be the only recourse.
"What psychological challenges should we anticipate in those who volunteer in good faith and with great courage, yet find themselves confronting misgivings or loneliness or feelings of rage or beset with mental illness?" asked Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Is NASA open to candidate suggestions?
They’re not going to get very far on $1.1 million.
Didn’t Heinlein or Clark write a book about it....”The Ark” or something like it.
That would have been a story!
Reminds me that the New Horizons project team was partially selected on age - they had to be around (as in “not retired”) when the spacecraft whizzes by Pluto in 2015.
Must be some misunderstanding. Unless we KNOW that there is a habitable planet at Alpha Centauri or another nearby star, it would be a suicide mission.
Have these idiots ever heard of the moon? If you want to develop and test equipment to colonize another world, it makes sense to do it where you can rescue the test subjects if things go wrong. It’s also much easier to resupply them and change personell if needed.
Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky was a generation starship novel, as was Aldis’s Starship (kinda dumb US title, revealing the big secret in the title). And then there was the TV show The Starlost.
I liked the Space: 1999 episode with Joan Collins on the generation starship that suffered an accident and the survivors turned to cannibalism to survive.
Other than that, we can get to Mars with current technology and you'd have to assume that if Germany had won WW-II, human feet would have been on Mars again no later than around 1990.
so, we were dating the same woman I hear
“The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles.”
Um, at only 1,000 mph, you can go 876,000,000 miles in 100 years. Wow “journalists” suck at math. Or at English. Or both.
Now, at “space shuttle” speed of about 17,500 mph, you’d go 15,330,000,000 miles in 100 years, or about 0.26% of a light year. The closest star is about 4 light years away, and the closest known exoplanet is about 10.5 light years away. Even ion engines used on exploratory satellites aren’t nearly fast enough to reach those, so yeah, they definitely need a faster engine than existing ones.
PS Incidentally, at “space shuttle” speed, you could reach Mars in about 5 months if you timed the launch properly with respect to the Earth’s and Mar’s orbits. Of course, the shuttle isn’t designed for that kind of trip.
Real astronauts use diapers...
There’s a 30 min. audio transcribed adaptation from the 1950s “X Minus One” radio show called, surprise, “Universe”.
Can we volunteer people for this one way mission..maybe like the entire cast of The View, Jersey Shore and the Daily Show?
Just stop there and cover all the bases.
/johnny
bump
These long distance space travels have been considered since the 1950’s by scientists and science fiction writers. Gerard O’Neill was a big advocate of them, and I remember attending a lecture of his that included multi-generational travel. I asked if “technological atrophy” in the culture would be a problem, since folks on the ship don;t have ‘real’ jobs that push their mental limits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill
“Universe” and its sequel, “Common Sense,” make up the novel Orphans in the Sky. If you enjoyed “Universe,” check out the novel, the second half works well.
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