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Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
- InclinedPlane 14y agoI hate hate hate this idea. It's so very wrong headed. Yes, it'd certainly help bootstrap manned spaceflight. But I talked to someone who knows about these things and he told me a secret, no matter HOW you spend a trillion dollars on a space project you're going to do a hell of a lot to bootstrap spaceflight. We don't need this, it's silly, we should not be taking it seriously. We already have the technology and the know how to build cities in orbit and colonies on Mars, we should do that directly instead of being distracted by this side show. Edit: If we gave SpaceX a contract for a trillion dollars (only payable upon completion of each task) we could probably have 10 million people living on Mars by 2030.
- tptacek 14y agoHere's NASASPACEFLIGHT.COM making fun of this: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28821.0 http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28821.0
- Natsu 14y agoI can't believe that none of them commented on the giant laser in the front.
- lotharbot 14y agoFantastic final post: "Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked." Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.
- gaius 14y agoTo be fair, the shuttle is also a 60s design... So much for NASA engineers.
- lotharbot 14y agoThe shuttle proposal was from the late 60s, but the major design work was done in the 70s. Most importantly, the design work was done based on mission requirements, not based on a misguided desire to mimic fiction. The requirements for a manned Moon or Mars mission are quite different from the requirements for an orbital mission or a TV show.
- rednum 14y agoThis thread is actually kinda sad. The guy seems to be full of passion, but doesn't have knowledge of actual engineering/science to do anything useful in that direction; (and seems to be unwilling to criticaly think and learn something, but that's another point). I wonder, if somebody set him in right direction when he was younger (think a good math teacher) would he work with those nasa guys now? It seems to me that true passion is a resource many tech communities could really use.
- anigbrowl 14y agoI wish the engineers at NASA spaceflight, instead of taking a dump on the guy, would applaud his enthusiasm and then explain the better and cooler things that could be achieved with a trillion dollars over 20 years. Technologically they're dead right, but they come off as a bunch of unimaginative jerks.
- nextstep 14y agoMaybe this is a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, but doesn't the Enterprise run on antimatter? I don't think we're going to be able to manufacture antimatter in large quantities in the next 20 years.
- rmc 14y agoThe faster than speed of light thing'll be hard aswell.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoNo worries, we'll just reverse the phase polarity.
- systematical 14y agoThat or use a heisenberg compensator.
- Sapient 14y agoOr bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish!
- rmc 14y agoMake sure you reverse the polarity of the neutron stream, otherwise it won't work.
- thebigshane 14y agoSimple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708699/quotes?qt=qt0403693 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708699/quotes?qt=qt0403693]
- falcolas 14y agoThis seems like a "how can we make the Enterprise with modern materials/techniques", as an inspiration to get to the stars. The design, aside from the overall shape, is completely divorced from the design of the ships in the shows.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- joejohnson 14y agoA trillion dollars is $50 billion per year over 20 years. From the site: “It is proposed that the US dedicate .27% of its GDP each year to the NASA Enterprise program. To get some sense of what spending .27% of the GDP each year will mean, consider that between 1963 and 1972, during the Apollo era, the US spent on average .50% of GDP per year as shown in the center column in the table to the right. This is about double the level of spending proposed for funding the Enterprise program. .27% of GDP will be about $40 billion for the year 2012. $40 billion is certainly a lot of money to spend – but it’s not that much when you consider that the federal budget in 2012 is $3700 billion ($3.7 Trillion). $40 billion seems like pocket change from the perspective of federal spending. $40 billion is 1.1% of the 2012 federal budget. This compares to an average of 2.8% of the federal budget which was spent each year on NASA between 1963 and 1972 as shown in the rightmost column in the table above.”
- untog 14y agoCongratulations on copy and pasting from tptacek's link.
- PaulHoule 14y agoHo Hum. What we need to do is sample return from the moon's north pole and see if there really is a glacier there!
- iRobot 14y agoSomeone should explain to this guy the concept of bootstrapping. Saying that a man should be allowed to dream big and NASA are the ones who we should be laughing at considering they currently cant even send a man 100 miles into space. Hopefully Elon and the new generation of space entrepreneurs will remedy this over time.
- protomyth 14y agoIf we are going to build a ship from fiction, we probably should start with the Discovery One from 2001.
- jasimq 14y agoI would like some pod racers from Star Wars first.
- smacktoward 14y agoOr just the landspeeders! Imagine the savings on highway maintenance if we all drove cars without wheels...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- breckinloggins 14y agoThere's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound. A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69! If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars. But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit. How. Incredibly. Disappointing. I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas. I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again. In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!"). Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer? So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.
- smacktoward 14y ago> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s So the solution is to build a ship based on a design from 1965?
- breckinloggins 14y agoNo. And that's why I think a lot of the criticism of the project is valid. The solution is to build something that captures the imagination. Something that LOOKS like a ship from the future. It doesn't have to be the Enterprise.
- gouranga 14y agoI'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks. Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoContinuing both themes, I'd rather spend the money to make us us Borg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29
- gouranga 14y agoIndeed. If you ever read Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, that's what we'll end up as at some point in the near future. It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us. I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.
- drostie 14y agoI remember a great comment from a talk by John Searle about the scariest way that this could happen. Imagine that you get just such an implant, and suddenly, you just feel woozy or tired, as if something is really going royally wrong, as if your consciousness is no longer really "in control." The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it out, now!" -- but that's not what you say. Your lips articulate instead, "Doc, it feels great, I'm almost ready to check out and get back to work." You live the rest of your life a prisoner in your own brain, which has been co-opted and taken over by the artificially intelligent electronics.
- gouranga 14y agoSociety already does a good job of this without the need for technology or artificial intelligence. I'd genuinely rather spend my day chopping wood, picking fruit or fishing, but no, I'm chained to a desk in front of Visual Studio 2010 pumping out code to prop up the insurance industry. I still don't know why I do it. Something has taken me over and it's not artificially intelligent electronics.
- civilian 14y agoIf we build a space elevator for 10-20 billion USD, it would bring down the cost of building the USS Enterprise (and really, all space construction) vastly. I think a space elevator is a better thing to build!
- theorique 14y agoWould a space elevator cost only $10-20B? Burj Khalifa, a half-mile high building cost $1-2B already. Hard to imagine a space elevator costing only 10-20x the price of the world's tallest building. A space elevator would presumably need to use a range of as yet non-existent and/or unproven technologies (very long carbon nanotube ropes, etc).
- civilian 14y agoYeah. I think the 10-20b is based off of stronger carbon nanotubes. But I think we have strong enough nanotubes at the moment. However, the stronger they get, the fewer we have to use, and the cheaper it will be.
- stcredzero 14y agoYou don't even need to build all the way to orbit or even space. A 20km tall tower made out of ordinary steel with a launch accelerator built into it would dramatically reduce the cost to orbit. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27775/ http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27775/
- wtracy 14y agoMy understanding is that they are now strong enough, but we can't make them long enough. We have no way to "weld" them together after their creation to make longer tubes without sacrificing their integrity.
- warfangle 14y agoIf you front-load the cost of a mostly-automatable construction of a space elevator (factory in orbit spitting out woven carbon nanotubes in opposite direction like a spider's spinnerets - this is almost definitely wandering into the realm of sci-fi, but maybe?), synthesizing the manufacturing components and launching them to orbit will be the most difficult part. And if we can refine those materials from asteroids, that cuts the resource extraction cost as well - no need to ship it to orbit. (besides, what if the manufacturing technique for said carbon nanotube ropes require a weightless environment?) There's even research into using the earth's magnetic field to generate electric potential this way. Then of course there's the collision and weather and so on and so forth.
- moconnor 14y agoI love the idea that someone is dreaming this big; as others have said this is clearly a terrible way to go about space exploration, though. Building X 'because we can' is never as good as building X 'because then we can do Y'. Planetary Resources have it exactly right - find an economic imperative to go into space, and ingenuity will follow.
- WalterSear 14y agoWow. There isn't even a space boom yet, and there's already a bubble for it.
- existentialmutt 14y agoWhat, no kickstarter page?
- tomjen3 14y agoDo there even exist a trillion dollar? I don't mean a trillion dollars worth of wealth, but a trillion dollar in currency (or even as deposits in banks)?
- fennecfoxen 14y agoThe Federal Reserve can answer your money-related question! Let's go to their website and look at H6, "Money Stock Measures" - http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/h6.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/h6.htm According to this release, as of April 2012, the money supply measure M1 (currency + check-like thingies) consisted of $1707.9 billion, of which $1036.9 billion was actual circulating currency (not in vaults). So, yes. There is roughly $1 trillion USD currency circulating. If you include savings-account-like thingies, M2, there is $9842.2 billion in money.
- tomjen3 14y agoSorry. I had forgotten that it was the M3 they cancelled and not the M1.
- waiwai933 14y agoWell, the US Gross Domestic Product is over $15 trillion, so presumably, yes.
- lumberjack 14y agoPersonally I don't see us achieving anything close to pop-sci space exploration fantasies when four fifths of our species are still struggling to survive day by day.
- tomjen3 14y agoI used to think like you. But we have been trying to solve that problem forever. It is not going to happen. Ever. So might we not have fun as part of the 1/5 who make it to space?
- lumberjack 14y agoYou sort of misinterpreted my post. My fault though. My post was a bit ambiguous. I wasn't implying that we should abandon all current space endeavours so as to focus on humanitarian causes. I wasn't even implying that we will never do any advancements in space exploration without first solving these socio-political problems. But I don't see the current first world countries and their resources as having the means to do what is envisioned in the article (which is a far cry from our current space programs). And note that I wasn't only talking about the economic stratification. One fifth of the world might be in an economic condition where big space exploration would be feasible but do they have the right mindset, education and motivation? Are they willing to throw away their greed and nationalism and collaborate with the rest of the first world to reach another milestone? Do they even value such an achievement? I myself am a great advocate of space exploration. I was merely pointing out some inefficiencies in our socio-political ecosystem that are holding us back.
- sevenstar 14y agoHumanity needs a jump start... again.
- sparknlaunch12 14y agoWow. This has been deeply thought through. I don't think the final design will mimic the fictional one, but certainty have to admire the passion. Hopefully some people with the money and the brains can get behind this.
- Scramblejams 14y ago> This has been deeply thought through. It hasn't. Read tptacek's link to see why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009591
- tomjen3 14y agoThats only 3k for each american (roughly). Obviously that is a lot of money, but I doubt it is impossible to get. Heck, assuming the funds are to be spend at a constant interval it is 150 usd/year. Which is a lot less than the wars have cost.
- leeoniya 14y ago"The Gen1 Enterprise will be powered by three ion propulsion engines. These will provide constant acceleration, and versions of this technology are already used in spacecrafts." to my knowledge they are used in spacecraft that can afford acceleration cycles that last several years and "rapid" maneuvers that last several months. ion engines produce very little thrust but for a very long time. i'm not sure how practical they would be for anything except a lifetime spent aboard a ship on a never-ending quest to reach somewhere distant.
- rvkennedy 14y agoActually, a "long time" in space propulsion terms means more than a couple of minutes. The specific impulse of ion engines is sufficiently high that with sufficiently large engines, you would be talking weeks to get to Mars, rather than months by rocket.
- leeoniya 14y agowell, there's this one under development http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could-one-day-power-39day-trips-to-mars.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could... which says a pound of thrust and Sun -> Jupiter (483 million mi) in 19 months and mars in 39 days (from earth i think). edge of the solar system is another 88.8 billion mi. that's a long time just to get out of the solar system. i always imagined the USS Enterprise to be an interstellar ship. but it could work as a solar system taxi as well :)
- horsehead 14y agowill it have beaming capabilities? That's all i care for.
- gojomo 14y agoI believe the two largest items in the budget are: $890 Billion - licensing fees to Roddenberry estate & Paramount $67 Billion - overturning relativistic physics
- hwillis 14y agoFun fact: that 100MW laser is in "cut the ISS in half in a fraction of a second" territory. 5KW lasers are used for cutting through 1/4" aluminum.
- wtracy 14y agoAnd this guy still wants it to have one-minute sustained output. He hasn't provided anything that I consider a compelling reason for this.
- ddet 14y agoWhy don't you build a fusion reactor instead?
- madao 14y agoI think we really need to look at this historically, the first sailors used smaller ships which were only able to follow the coast or travel short distances up rivers, further development in navigation and hull designs allowed them to cross the great depths even further. I think we are still in the Raft stage of space exploration, although it is a great idea, I think we need to work on those little steps. Getting back to the moon and/or perhaps chasing asteroids seems much more practical at this time I don't think colonisation of mars will ever happen unless we gain the capacity to build bigger ships in orbit of earth, it just costs to much to get things up there. If we can solve the issue of getting basic materials and manpower into orbit and then set up supply lines that do not involve earth then we will be ready to start making caravels instead of rafts.
- sevenstar 14y agoSo we could have had 15 of these already ? http://www.usdebtclock.org/ http://www.usdebtclock.org/
- technomancy 14y agoI eagerly await the inevitable arguments from TNG fans about why the NCC-1701-D design is superior for this purpose.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoIsaac Asimov expressed an interesting view of the future development of space travel [1]. Basically, humans develop true AI first in the form of positronic computers/brains. Then, the AI figures out how to make Hyperspatial travel work, something humans had been unable to do. Obviously we're nowhere near that yet, but one can dream. 1. http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/I%2C_Robot http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/I%2C_Robot (search for 'Escape' or 'the brain')
- guest 14y agodidn't they finish this thing in the eighties?
- pdonis 14y agoHas anyone found a calculation in the specs of whether the power requirements given are sufficient to produce the required thrust, given the total mass of the ship? Here's what I come up with (rough numbers): Ship mass: 85,000 metric tons, or 85 million kg. Effective exhaust velocity: 150,000 m/s (1 g, or 10 m/s^2, times the quoted specific impulse of 15,000 s) This implies a power requirement of 75,000 Watts per Newton of thrust--half the effective exhaust velocity, since we're in the non-relativistic regime. For details, see for example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse Thrust required: 1.7 million Newtons (quoted mass above times 0.002g, or 0.02 Newtons/kg) Total power required for thrust: 130 billion Watts, or 130 Gigawatts, or more than 50 times the power quoted in the specs. Am I missing something, or will this ship need 50 sets of reactors to power its engines?
- pdonis 14y agoI have posted a comment in the Build the Enterprise forums here: http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-enterprise-is-it-technically-possible/reactor-power-seems-to-be-way-too-low#p776 http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-enterprise...
- jamesflorentino 14y agoThis reminds me of those naive individuals wanting to develop games without knowledge whatsoever in the engineering and programming aspect of building one. Beat me up, scotty.
- JabavuAdams 14y agoThis is stupid. The real thing is happening right now, but it doesn't look futuristic enough. What we need in space now is infrastructure. Unsexy, boxy, gantried infrastructure. Why can't I get HD video from the moon without pointing a 20m dish there?
- toong 14y agoBesides the technical and ideological objections, no one seems to be mentioning that 1 trillion USD just won't cut it ? Those few new shiny F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will cost "an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050" http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/ And you expect to build the frickin' USS Enterprise for 1 trillion ?
- Sapient 14y agoIt really hard to imagine the entire trillion dollars went into the development of the F-35. Maybe it did, or maybe there was another secret plane developed at the same time...
- yaix 14y agoThere is a DARPA financed project called the "100 Years Space Ship", that's the real Enterprice building project. http://100yss.org/ http://100yss.org/ Mission Statement: "100 Year Starship will pursue national and global initiatives, and galvanize public and private leadership and grassroots support, to assure that human travel beyond our solar system and to another star can be a reality within the next century."
- bashzor 14y agoIf we're having trouble funding the Joint Strike Fighter, I don't see this coming "off the ground" any time soon.
- simonh 14y agoSo after the ISS and Space Shuttle, what we really need is an inefficient, pointless white elephant to get things going again. Because those two other big pointless white elephants weren't big enough, or white enough. Or something. What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme. At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.