Image: National Air and Space Museum
An engineer is petitioning the White House to study the possibility of building a real-life starship Enterprise like the fictional vessel in television's "Star Trek."
The proposal was submitted through the White House's official "We the People" channel, which promises an administration response to any petition that gathers at least 25,000 signatures. Just last month, a petition to build a Death Star like the spherical spaceship in the movie "Star Wars" garnered that critical mass, and is currently awaiting its official response.
The Enterprise proposal comes from an engineer who goes by the name BTE Dan, who detailed plans for constructing a life-size, flyable starship Enterprise on his website last year.
"We have within our technological reach the ability to build the 1st generation of the USS Enterprise," BTE Dan wrote in the petition, viewable here.
As of this writing, the petition had 3,335 signatures, with more than 21,000 to go.
The project, BTE Dan maintains, wouldn't be a vanity exercise, but rather a practical step forward for space exploration. [The Top 10 Star Trek Technologies]
"It ends up that this ship's inspiring form is quite functional," he wrote. "This will be Earth's first gigawatt-class interplanetary spaceship with artificial gravity. The ship can serve as a spaceship, space station, and space port all in one. In total, one thousand crew members & visitors can be on board at once."
Some experts have questioned the feasibility of certain aspects of BTE Dan's plan — for example, no technology for artificial gravity currently exists, and the largest number of people ever accommodated on any space vehicle until now has been 13 (when the shuttle Discovery docked to the International Space Station in April 2010).
However, scientists are pursuing the dream of interstellar spaceflight — travel to other stars — which would require a significant technological leap from current spacecraft, none of which have yet left the solar system. An organization called 100 Year Starship, initially kicked off with seed money from NASA and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), aims to establish the technologies needed for interstellar flight within 100 years.
Plus, if the Enterprise could be built, BTE Dan argues that its motivational benefits would match its scientific paybacks.
"Few things could collectively inspire people on Earth more than seeing the Enterprise being built in space," he wrote. "And the ship could go on amazing missions, like taking the first humans to Mars while taking along a large load of base-building equipment for constructing the first permanent base there."
For more details about the proposed Enterprise plans, see BTE Dan's site: BuildTheEnterprise.org.
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2 Comments
Add CommentWhile I agree with the idea of building a self-sustaining intrastellar ship of some kind I think BTE is suffering from "a solution in search of a problem". He tries his best to fit existing technologies into the enterprise design which is the wrong approach. The Enterprise was not designed to solve the "spaceship" problem. It was designed to solve the entertainment problem. The "spaceship" problem is still being researched so not only do we not have all the answers, we don't have all the questions. One of the biggest questions is economics. Who is going to pay for it? Economically speaking I think we are much better off keeping our feet on the ground and sending robots. Not only is it safer, but the spinoffs from robotics research will have direct benefits here on earth. In the end we may discover that the best way for mankind to explore space is not to try and recreate earth in a spaceship, but instead to create humans, biological or mechanical, that are suited to spaceflight.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile I do enthusiastically support efforts to advance our very primitive spacefaring skills, trying to adhere to a very old sci-fi model that flies in the face of science is... well, not right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA large ring-shaped construct would help emulate gravity decently, and would be in line with an Alcubierre Drive design. Not that we'd be building the actual drive yet with our energy tech, but building expertise for the right-shape ship would be way more useful than complying with trekkies' fantasies, right? Besides, a first generation ship would probably be more spacestation than actual transport while options and solutions are worked on for propulsion systems, life support, radiation shielding, and many many et-ceteras, too.
Shape follows function. Many designs have been proposed based on real science, for space stations and both interplanetary and interstellar flight. Look at those, and we can still name it USS Enterprise I.
A larger space in space would help work out kinks on full-autonomy food & water production & recycling systems, among many other interesting and necessary tech developments if we ever want to get off this little rock and boldly (or foolishly) go where no one has gone before...