And spacious recreational facilities, with enough room and resources to support vast interior parks, might be crucial for fighting off the existential crisis of spending an entire lifetime crammed inside a spacecraft. Sections for growing crops or livestock, for example, could dwarf more traditional compartments. A starship designed to keep its occupants alive for years, decades, or even centuries, would require systems unheard of in current spacecraft. Of course, mankind can't survive on gravity alone. Aside from being disoriented by chronic light-headedness, if the goal is to re-create the way blood circulates under the influence of gravity, consistency is key.ĭiscovery One, from 2001: A Space Odyssey The smaller the centrifuge, the less consistent the centrifugal force is across a crew member's body-the head, in other words, will feel lighter than the feet. The spinning disc on the Jupiter-bound Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey illustrated this concept well, but Millis says that to better simulate Earth gravity, the real thing would actually have to be much larger. "With the physics we know, you create gravity with a giant centrifuge, a rotating cabin, basically," Millis says. In prolonged zero-g, the human body erodes, losing bone and muscle density. Consider gravity, a necessity on long-distance spaceflights. Millis says the first person-carrying starships, however, will be dominated by the technologies that keep those passengers alive. It's a colossal rocket, albeit a weird fusion-powered one. In the case of Icarus, for example, the entire structure is devoted to propulsion. Predicting what the first unmanned starships might look like is relatively simple. If anything, the equivalent Cylon ships in the rebooted TV series are more rational interstellar travelers, with their spindly arms and flagrant disregard for the entire air-centric history of aerospace. A starship doesn't need to be sleek or have a pointy nose-even the stocky Battlestar Galactica is pointlessly aircraft-shaped. Perhaps the small ships that carry people from surface to starship will remain winged, but truly interstellar vehicles can scrap aerodynamics and all of the design principles that are beholden to reducing wind resistance. In both the near and far-term future, experts such as Millis imagine interstellar vessels won't spend much of their time in an atmosphere. Like the Russian Soyuz capsule, SpaceX's Dragon currently splashes down in the ocean (though SpaceX plans to move toward rocket-powered launchpad landings). And wings aren't even required for landings. The only real-world spacecraft that bother with wings are ones designed to make regular landings on runways, such as the retired Space Shuttle, the upcoming Lynx (a suborbital two-seater from XCOR) or the Dream Chaser, an in-development orbital craft from Sierra Nevada. One look at the Icarus design-or its predecessor, the Daedalus-and it's clear what starships don't need: wings. We asked Millis, who once led NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, to take us through the basics of starship design. It's simply the design that might make sense to build first. But according to Millis, Icarus isn't a definitive, catch-all prediction of what an interstellar craft might look like. The skyscraper-size behemoth is comprised almost entirely of rows and clusters of spherical fuel tanks. Icarus, as it's currently envisioned, isn't the sleekest space ride. The foundation has proposed candidate technologies and designs, including the Icarus unmanned fusion-powered probe, which would accelerate (theoretically, of course) to one-tenth or one-fifth the speed of light. Millis, founder of the Tau Zero Foundation. One of the participants of the 100 Year Starship project is Marc G. In fact, the 100 Year Starship initiative-which began as a DARPA-funded contest to lay the foundations for a flight across the stars, gathering physicists, entrepreneurs, and anyone seriously interested in long-distance space travel-just finished its annual symposium this past weekend. While a manned interstellar mission isn't exactly on NASA's upcoming schedule, researchers haven't abandoned the topic to science fiction. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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