DARPA wants a working manned starship for $500k Bad-boy Pentagon boffinry bureau DARPA has now released the official solicitation for its "100 Year Starship" project, intended to get human beings making interstellar voyages within a century. We've covered the 100 Year Starship push on these pages before, and the outline idea remains the same. A very small amount of US …
"Assuming for the sake of argument that the investment necessary to reach the Moon scaled up with distance, a series of basic missions to Alpha Centauri along the lines of the Apollo programme might cost 2 x 10^18 dollars"
Why yes... and if I assume for the sake of argument that the moon is made of cheese, then our interstellar travelers will not run out of gourmet starters for their trip to AC. What's the point of inventing such a ridiculous extrapolation? Yes, we get it, Interstellar travel will be costly. No, it will not cost 40,000 Earth GDPs, or even 0.01% of Earth GDP for the simple reason that if DID cost that much, it wouldn't get done.
"Assuming for the sake of argument that the investment necessary to reach the Moon scaled up with distance, a series of basic missions to Alpha Centauri along the lines of the Apollo programme might cost 2 x 1018 dollars: that's 40,000 years' worth of the present-day gross domestic product of the entire human race."
My local taxi costs say 10UKP for a mile or so. This (for sake of argument) means that to travel to scotland from here (train,coach,plane) would cost six grand - dont think so. Likewise travle to/from our local airports via the same taxi is much much cheaper on a per mile basis.
I think someone needs to read Ben Bova - he covered how commercial space enterprises could possibly take off.
You're confusing investment and cost. Your local taxi may charge you 10UKP for a mile or so, but you didn't invest anything - you paid to take advantage of existing infrastructure. The cabbie on the other hand has invested several thousand pounds into buying and maintaining a vehicle and the various licences that enable him to drive a taxi and run his business.
To go back to the article, obviously 2x10^18 USD is a number basically plucked from thin air but it doesn't invalidate the point that the cost would be eye wateringly large. An interstellar spaceship would have to be massively over-designed for disaster recovery if you gave even the slightest toss about the occupants.
"DARPA's principal customer – the American warfighter"
Isn't DARPA a taxpayer-funded outfit that is allocated money seized from the populace to come up with stuff the that military-industrial-congressional-entertainment complex can make money off?
The "American warfighter" ("soldier" no longer Rambo enough, I see) is the dumb sod who ends up with his gonads blown off, so he is definitely NOT the customer.
Except when he finally needs those futuristic prosthetic limbs.
"Customer Facing Liberty Vendor"?...sheer genius.
Words that should make us proud, yes Proud I say, to be human....
(when I said "us", I didn't really mean anyone south of Carlisle...sorry, didn't mean to get yer hopes up).
Oh...and just in case anyone who has seen my rants before thinks that I've forgotten.....
Project Orion....you know it makes sense.
Ok, OK, I'm going...
(mines the one made out of lead)
People who do research for the US armed forces are constantly reminded that the results have to work for the people on the ground. And the term warfighter is in the process of being rolled back in favor of "soldier" right now - not sure that is the best thing. I think too many people get their notion of the military from bad 1908s movies.
I like it here, too. However, we should be wary of putting all our eggs in one basket.
True, at the moment, we only have one basket, but that should just be motivation for finding another that's suitable.
What will you do in the event of an asteroid collision? Or gamma-ray burst? Or one of the many other potentially apocalyptic cosmic events that could kill us all?
$500,000?
I remember in year 5 when we did 'compound interest' we all excitedly worked out that if we put $1 in a bank account, in only 2,147 years we would all be very wealthy.
I know DARPA play the long game, but really, didn't they realise THHGTTG is fiction?
DARPA: "Neither the vagaries of the modern fiscal cycle, ..."
Given that corporations work these days on quarterly cycle, I see absolutely no hope for such a long-term project in the commercial sector.
To date, the only succesful centuries-spanning organizations are either unusually stable countries, or religious organizations (like the Catholic Church). So set up a new Church of the Starship, with spacefaring as the holiest sacrament, and you might have some hope...
Your budget: 500 grand.
Your project: To build a working Interstellar spacecraft.
Solution: Get an IT Project Manager in to run it. This sort of thing is business-as-bloody-usual. In fact it's rather simpler than usual as they haven't demanded delivery of the finished product within 6 months as one would normally expect.....
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