DARPA Releases Request For Information For The 100 Year Starship Study

reply to post by burntheships

Beam me up, Scotty.

Heinlein's science was good.
His stories and characters are what grabbed me most.

reply to post by Phage


Yes yes. I was drawn in by many of his works...he was one of the best.
Interesting that he knew that the future spaceships would have to be paid for,
something that the Pentagon and NASA still grapple with.

One of my favorites...The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I guess its not without a sense of irony now that we should be dreaming more of the future and not the past.

All I can say is: It's about time DARPA.

First and foremost, this project needs to be built in outerspace, I suggest utilizing the moon as a tethered base of construction operations.

reply to post by Illustronic


No need to get your panties in a twist, they're not "reporting on a starship" per se. The OP even quoted the article and mentioned that "Neither DARPA nor NASA are actually building a 100-Year Starship".

The article is actually reporting on the 3-day event in Orlando this weekend:

Called the 100-Year Starship Symposium, the public event runs Friday through Sunday in Orlando, Fla. For three days, scientists from universities, NASA centers and private institutions will discuss far-out ideas for building a spaceship to visit another star.

Here's the link to the article again www.msnbc.msn.com...

Hopefully people will finally start to make the connections to this and Genesis.....

Why don't we just get rid of the silly 'ethics' issue regarding genetically engineering humans? Alter them so tissues, cells etc can survive the freezing process like some amphibians. In which case the massive amount of resources etc needed to maintain a big population for hundreds or even thousand years would not be needed, or at the very least drastically reduced.

reply to post by Solomons


Yes, this is DARPA living foundries.
They are one step ahead of the game.

I bet they already did this back in the 60's and are just seeing what the public thinks so they can compare and laugh about it because they have already done it and surpassed it.

Starship - check
Warpdrive - check
Antigravity - check
Terraform - still working on that one, but we need to hurry because we need a place to hide when the people learn to open their eyes...

Source: "UFOs Crash and Burn at 100 Year Starship Symposium"
www.starpod.org...

"[Physicist] John Cramer calls on me to ask the Pundits -- Ken Olum, Marc Millis, Eric Davis, Harold White & some Sci Fi writer I never heard of -- a question. I ask: What about the 800 pound gorilla in the room, flying saucers?"

At this point the UFO topic crashed and burned.

So much for 'advanced' propulsion.

the money spent on space fake ery has set humanity back 60 years
its a fact one cant escape , verner v braun even said it during his last years alive.

im not even gonna start rambling about the scientist who ve been killed due to warmongering,
all i can do is bow my head in shame,..

humanity as a whole needs to get a grip of it self if we are going to get our selfs
to the next level of our evolution.

i mean, there must be enough space junk up there for us to start building something in the right direction ,

i dont want to be a pessimist about the subject but i see very little light at the end of the tunnel with thing going as they do.

100-Year Starship UPDATE:

The BBC has posted this today...

"Former astronaut to lead starship effort"
www.bbc.co.uk...

Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, was notified last week that she had won, according to a copy of a Darpa letter obtained by the BBC.

reply to post by Larryman


Nice catch Larryman!
I am glad this idea is progressing-I thought it may just get put in the bin due to the potential cost,but great to see that is not the case so far!

Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, was notified last week that she had won, according to a copy of a Darpa letter obtained by the BBC.
Since leaving Nasa, Jemison has been involved in science education programmes, and is known as a space travel enthusiast and long-time Star Trek fan.
Her organisation, the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, is partnered on the Darpa project with Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to interstellar travel, and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Wow, she sounds like quite a lady!
Star trek fan
I wish her and the project all the best,and I hope they are looking at graphene and meta materials.
And I hope they have access to secret tech we have never heard of.
Being DARPA,they should have some funky tech IMO.
Cold fusion/mini wormhole/antimatter reactors and the like.

They really should make the whole project public I think-hit all media outlets,get people thinking about this and sending in ideas to the project.
I would tell them they need to create their own atmosphere on board the 100year starship,through the growing of plants,which they could also eat and make other compounds from.
They would need a factory,able to be re tooled for many different tasks.

And shielding-they need to work on some kind of shield which will nullify the effects of micro meteors.
An EM shield I am thinking,powered by the friction of high speed travel maybe.

I love the project as an idea,and think we should be at least trying to expand of space travel capabilities.

If Dr. Mae Jemison seeks F-T-L technology... then I'm excited. If she adopts the "it's a bridge too far" path... then I reject her 100-year Starship plan. And I would also add the requirement of non-propellant, field-based, ship launching - which I think is associated with F-T-L tech.

Here's a Popular Science article on Dr. Mae Jemison winning the DARPA 100-Year Starship contest...

"Mae Jemison, Who Was the First Black Woman in Space, Will Now Lead 100-Year Starship Project"
www.popsci.com...