Planetary securityDARPA, NASA collaborate on "100-Year Starship" project
DARPA, NASA collaborate on a study to examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned space flight a century from now; “The 100-Year Starship study looks to develop the business case for an enduring organization designed to incentivize breakthrough technologies enabling future spaceflight,” the mission statement says
DARPA and NASA seek starship industy feasibility // Source: utexas.edu
NASA has just begun work on an interstellar starship. A recent U.S. government statement (pdf) outlining the so-called “100-Year Starship study,” in which NASA’s Ames Research Center will participate, says:
The 100-Year Starship study will examine the business model needed to develop and mature a technology portfolio enabling long-distance manned space flight a century from now. This goal will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources. The year-long study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed…
The 100-Year Starship study looks to develop the business case for an enduring organization designed to incentivize breakthrough technologies enabling future spaceflight.
Lewis Page reads this statement to mean that, in fact, NASA is not working on an actual ship as such, but rather on a “construct” or “enduring organization” of some kind which would be able to raise the enormous funds required to build a starship during the next century.
“The 100-Year Starship study is about more than building a spacecraft or any one specific technology,” says Paul Eremenko, official coordinating the effort. “We endeavor to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies and cross-cutting innovations across a myriad of disciplines such as physics, mathematics, biology, economics, and psychological, social, political and cultural sciences, as well as the full range of engineering disciplines to advance the goal of long-distance space travel, but also to benefit mankind.”
Page writes that it would seem that someone has been re-reading Robert Heinlein’s classic Time for the Stars, in which a non-profit organization called the Long Range Foundation exists in the future for the purpose of funding expensive projects with no short-term payoff.
Page notes that at least so far, no human organization has appeared with both the financial clout and the long-term commitment that would appear necessary to get humanity out among the stars. “Developing such a ‘construct’ and its underlying business case would seem a challenge perhaps as great in its way as the building of the actual ships, and potentially just as likely to fail,” he writes.
NASA Ames’ partner organization in the 100-Year Starship study is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Eremenko works at DARPA rather than NASA. He is in charge of the System F6 swarm-satellite project).
