The First Starship

Within the 21st century, an interstellar starship will take off for one of the nearest stars…

Named Project Daedalus, the British Interplanetary Society has come out with a detailed study – or a feasibility report – for a robotic mission to Barnard’s Star some six light years away. The Daedalus would accelerate for nearly four years, reaching velocities of over ten percent the speed of light. The Daedalus would take over twenty years to design and build; and the journey could take as many as fifty years.

On board computers would coordinate the entire mission – they would carry out repairs using mobile robotic units, perform experiments, and relay data back to the earth.
But what propulsion system would the spaceship use?

Among the options studied were solar sails and fusion reactors. The team of scientists finally settled on nuclear pulse rockets. Many scientists, however, are skeptical with regards to the specifics of nuclear pulse rockets…

Project Orion, the brainchild of Professor Dyson (Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies), proposes using a simple fission reactor with a plasma rocket. Dr. Jaffe (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) also proposes using an ion drive powered by fission generators. The advantage of using fission reactors – as opposed to nuclear fission – is that the technology is already available. Dr. Robert Forward (Hughes Research Laboratories), however proposes using a giant array of lasers to power photon sails, using interstellar magnetic fields to change directions.

But the debate over what would constitute the most viable propulsion method may be misplaced. With several alternatives available, Dr. Forward believes that the interstellar probe should be designed first. And recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) mean that the interstellar probe will be run by onboard computers.

Unmanned interstellar missions – in the near future – are no longer in doubt. But, if men have to journey to the stars, a new set of questions (and problems) need to be answered. There are questions relating to design of habitat, and psychological problems relating to human isolation. But Oren Micks (NASA) counters these arguments by reminding us that Marco Polo took no less than twenty-four years from Venice to China and back!