[FPSPACE] FW: Centauri Dreams - The Ultimate Project: 10000 Year Journey

[LARRY KLAES]

>From: Centauri Dreams <gilster at mindspring.com>
>Reply-To: Centauri Dreams <gilster at mindspring.com>
>To: ljk4 at msn.com
>Subject: Centauri Dreams
>Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2008 14:04:03 -0600 (CST)
>
>Centauri Dreams
>
>///////////////////////////////////////////

>The Ultimate Project: 10000 Year Journey
>
>Posted: 26 Feb 2008 01:26 PM CST

>http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=1738
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>When youre thinking interstellar, long time frames are inescapable. Are we 
>capable as a culture of planning missions that last not only longer than a 
>single human lifetime, but longer than multiple generations? Steve Kilston 
>(Ball Aerospace  Technologies), with help from Sven and Nancy Grenander, 
>clearly thinks so. The three are behind the fittingly named Ultimate 
>Project, a starship designed to carry one million humans across the light 
>years separating us from the nearest stars, creating colonies and perhaps 
>going on from there, a ten thousand year star journey that could turn into 
>a trek through the galaxy lasting for millions more.
>
>For just to get such a mission to the launch point, Kilston is thinking in 
>terms of century-long segments within an overall 500-year plan. 100 years 
>to develop the plan for the mission. 100 more years to achieve a detailed 
>design. Now a century for prototyping and demonstrating technologies, 
>followed by a century to assemble materials and construct the spacecraft. A 
>final one hundred years for a shakedown cruise in the Solar System. You can 
>see that were looking at societal commitments on the order of the great 
>cathedrals of Europe, but going substantially beyond even their protracted 
>construction in terms of time and expense.
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>A few assumptions travel with this project. Because scientific discoveries 
>are much harder to predict than changes in technology, the Ultimate Project 
>assumes new technology but no new physics. And it operates with the 
>certainty that experiments and discoveries in coming centuries will alter 
>its plans, that experience triumphs over theory every time, and that 
>advances en-route will continue the process of updating the plan until the 
>mission is accomplished. Im drawing these premises from a presentation 
>Steve Kilston made at the second Space Mission Challenges for Information 
>Technology conference, which provides far more background material than I 
>can offer here.
>
>That being said, the current daunting specs are what you might expect of an 
>interstellar ark: A vehicle of 100 million tons, with a cost of $50 
>trillion, built as a cylindrical shell some two kilometers long and two 
>kilometers in diameter, with ten or more decks of habitable space and 1 g 
>of gravity provided by rotation. The great pyramid of Cheops has 
>one-sixteenth the mass of this ship, which carries twice the land area of 
>the island of Manhattan, offering 125 square meters per person. The 
>propulsion method: Magnetically confined deuterium/Helium-3 fusion, a 
>technique familiar from Project Daedalus here updated and now using the 
>atmosphere of Uranus for the necessary store of Helium-3.
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>Expansion plans? Count on twenty Sun-like stars within six parsecs of 
>Earth, a range reachable within 10,000 years. Figure 2000 years to settle a 
>new planet and build two new starships to continue the voyage. The net rate 
>of expansion becomes one parsec every 2000 years, with the Milky Way 
>explored in some forty million years. The Ultimate Projects Web site is 
>bare-bones at present and the link to the Projects recent poster 
>presentation at the JPL Exoplanet Fair is broken, but I assume that 
>oversight will be repaired soon. Or perhaps not. With five hundred years to 
>launch, the site operators may see no need to rush.
>
>Steve Kilston has been involved with Webster Cashs New Worlds starshade 
>concepts and has worked at Ball Aerospace on imaging Earth-like planets 
>around other stars. He may be an optimist in terms of the cost of the 
>Ultimate Project and my guess is that 500 years from now the type of fusion 
>the Project now focuses on will have been superseded, but 
>trans-generational endeavors begin somewhere, and I know of no one else who 
>is currently doing what the British Interplanetary Society did, bringing 
>solid scientific and engineering knowledge to bear on a complete design 
>aimed at reaching the stars. For that reason alone, the Ultimate Project is 
>worth keeping on your watch list.
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