The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) declared three winners of the Project Hyperion Design Competition. Teams designed a generation ship—a crewed interstellar spacecraft designed for a 250-year journey to a habitable planet. The teams designed habitats of such a spacecraft that would allow a society to sustain itself and flourish in a highly resource-constrained environment.
The designs needed to let 500-1500 people live comfortably for 250 years trips to other solar systems.
Artificial gravity would be provided via rotation.
On board there would be good living conditions, including essential provisions such as shelter, clothing, and other basic needs. There would be robust life support systems for food, water, waste, and the atmosphere.
The winner was team Chrysalis. They had system-level coherence and innovative design of the modular habitat structure. They described details for in-space manufacturing and the value of pre-mission crew preparation in Antarctica. Its modular shell design promotes flexibility and connectivity, supporting both functionality and scalability. The radiation protection strategy is solid, and the practical structural approach is well-suited.
The Chrysalis ship measures 58,000 meters (63,430 yards) from end to end and 6,000 meters (6,560 yards) in diameter and has a total mass of 2.4 billion metric tons (2.65 US tons). The spacecraft uses a Direct Fusion Drive (DFD) propulsion system and Helium-3 (3He) and deuterium (2H or D) fuel to generate 0.1 g (0.98 m/s2) of acceleration. After an acceleration period lasting one year, the designers anticipate a journey of at least 400 years, followed by a year of deceleration once they are within reach of Proxima b.
WFP Extreme was second place. The Extreme spacecraft has a central core and two counterrotating rings that provide simulated gravity while the counter-rotation minimizes Coriolis effects. Each ring measures 500 meters (~550 yards) in diameter and contains living quarters, workspaces, and social areas divided into six neighborhoods (three per ring). The core houses the ship’s hydroponic farms, energy systems, and control stations and is connected to the rings through a series of structural arms with elevators.
Third place was systema stellar proxima. It seems be build off of torus space station designs.
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The fission fragment rocket may do better if the fuel is in the form of thin fibres stretching from front to back. If fibres are just a few microns thick, most fission products escape with most of their energy.
One way to avoid the need for megatonnes of fissile material, is to use a fusion-fission hybrid system. Use ICF fusion to produce fast neutrons, which will then fast-fission natural uranium or thorium.
Why not capture an asteroid and use it as a construction site, then accelerate it when it’s ready to travel?
If the asteroid is an inner oort cloud object, then a relatively modest dV of 200m/s, would send it into the inner solar system. It could then use a Jupiter gravity assist to gain enough velocity to escape the solar system. That would be a very long journey to even the nearest star. But you are in a sense taking a whole world with you.
I feel sorry for people who travel to the stars like this.
Imagine how the people, generations old, arrive at their target star; and find in inhabited by humans that used faster travel methods, arriving hundreds of years before the generation ship.
Yes. And the generations of people forced to live their entire lives inside that thing. 58 km x 19 km (or 36 miles x 11.7 miles). 1097 square km. (420 square mi). About 1/10 the land area of the Bay Area, or half that of the island of Maui.
IMO interstellar migration will happen one of two ways:
Very slow — ten thousand years between star systems. The inner solar system, then the outer solar system, then the kuiper belt, then the inner oort cloud, etc. Eventually reaching it.
Very fast — under 20 years, by a solar-system-sized civilization capable of lavishing enormous (by today’s standards) energy and resources to do it.
Things like this are just thought experiments.
Did their study investigate the dangers of gas, dust and meteoroids and bigger objects and threat this poses? A collision at 1% c with a pebble-sized thing could do alot of damage.
The inner solar system gets *populated* by space habitats, then the outer solar system, etc., is what I meant.
Designing interstellar ships is a fun exercise, but I would love for that effort to be directed at this solar system first. I would love to live in O’Neil colony. Or on the moon or Mars. Or even get to have a long trip to an earth orbiting space station. I think those things precede interstellar travel, maybe by a lot. Growing up in the 70’s those things felt plausible, and now with reusable rockets they are finally is starting to feel plausible again.
fission fragment rocket sounds like lack of perspective for what constitutes a ‘multiplying medium’ – a mixture with a fuel atom spatial density high enough to ‘burn’ would only allow fission fragments to escape from the boundary zone (the edge). I’m not sure how the momentum aspect works with fragments being emitted isotropically, with less than half of them contributing any part of the momentum vector rearward, but it doesn’t really matter if they can’t escape the system and just heat the system.
If you’d like me to proof your article before you publish it, hit me up.
An object accelerating at 0.1g for one year will have a final velocity of 10% of the speed of light. Even taking into account acceleration time, it should take roughly 45 years to reach Proxima Centauri, not 400.
the problems of mass, energy, and heat management rapidly cause a runaway design especially when the minimum mass for a sustainable habitat for 500-1500 is started as a base. If we imagined perfected fission fragment drives, and then use 50X energy to weight density versus current submarine fission reactor with advanced molten salt, then the mass becomes manageable for mass produced nuclear reactors but there is still fuel to carry and thermal management systems. Plus the elapsed time involves accelerating and decelerating for a presumably colonization mission using a generation ship to Centauri. My next few articles look at fission fragment and at beam propulsion and then at dynamic soaring with plasma magnets to leverage solar wind efficiently up to about 3% of light speed. No fuel and other scaling problems
I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding. I wasn’t talking about the mass ratio. I was referring to the acceleration calculations. 0.1g of acceleration for a year would equal to 0.1c. Now, if it was 0.1m/s^2 for a year, then the final speed is 0.01c, which matches the travel time of 400 years to Proxima Centauri.
An unmentioned physics trick in the science fiction stories, and movies like “Passengers” and the SfFy Channel TV series, “The Ark”, involving such interstellar colonists spacecraft, is that the closer you are traveling to the speed of light, the SLOWER the time experience of the spacecraft’s occupants is. Although to the outside observer, their journey takes centuries, the passengers might be able to weather that time period without dying of old age, due to this Einstein time suspension effect.