Space securityTo boldly go -- but at a leisurely pace

Starship designs look slow enough to qualify // Source: rightpundits.com

Space enthusiasts will rejoice at the news that the U.S. government has reports early progress in its plan to build an interstellar starship capable of carrying people to other star systems than our own.

These same enthusiasts may be less pleased to learn that the starship project has a rather relaxed deadline — 2100AD — to get itself in gear. This is not only a more lackadaisical version of President Kennedy’s famous 1961 commitment to land a man on the moon “before this decade is out” – but, as Lewis Page writes, the goal of the U.S. government’s “100-Year Starship” project is to hand the task of actually organizing, funding and building the eventual starship to someone else because the U.S. agency in charge of the project does not think it has the energy and resolution to do the job.

“Looking at history, most significant exploration, like crossing oceans or continents for the first time, was sponsored by patrons or groups outside of government,” says David Neyland, top researcher in charge of the project. “We’re here because we’d like to start with a mechanism that gets this long-range project out of the government, and make sure it is an energized and self-sustaining enterprise.”

As Page noted when the 100-Year Starship plan was first announced, the idea seems to be that interstellar exploration will require the creation of some new kind of organization able to somehow seize and focus a major fraction of humanity’s resources over a long period of time.

Last week’s statement(pdf) from the 100-Year Starship project was to announce completion of an initial workshop to get the ball rolling. It is no surprise to note that “the workshop brought together 29 visionaries with diverse backgrounds from aerospace engineer to science fiction author.”

The 100-Year Starship project is run by DARPA, partnered with NASA.