
Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD - oconnor0
http://www.buildtheenterprise.org
======
breckinloggins
There'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.

~~~
pygorex
> 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 the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for
the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet.
The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life.
It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears
and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.

~~~
anigbrowl
We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats
and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological
development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for
walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods
over large distances on water and in the air.

~~~
pygorex
Those are all fair points. But they don't really address my assertion:

1\. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we
explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform _how_ we explore. Space travel is
so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots
or beings that are specialized to operate in space.

2\. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space
exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air
travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is
disingenuous.

3\. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans
there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh
water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources.
With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a
suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen
to land.

Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer
that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects
a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up,
plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable
endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.

~~~
anigbrowl
I agree with you on all these things, but subject to qualification. I think we
need to be developing human spaceflight in parallel with robotic exploration,
for the same reason that we don't do all our exploration on earth with
telescopes. Air travel is orders of magnitude more difficult than sea travel,
which is orders of magnitude more difficult than wandering about on land. I
think there is no substitute for getting out there and attempting a wide
variety of technological workarounds, notwithstanding the fact that many of
these will be futile or fatal. The key plus for me of private or even semi-
private space exploration is that failure or fatality won't mean a loss of
political capital, compared to publicly-owned and managed space endeavors.
Bluntly, we're more likely to discover better technologies if people are
allowed to blow themselves up in the pursuit of same. On the last point,
planetary colonization is one (remote) endpoint, if we can bootstrap it, but I
think asteroid mining and the like also offers the potential of non-planetary
habitation, which I find far more interesting. I remain optimistic about the
possibility of other propulsive or spatial traversal methods, notwithstanding
the limitations from our current theories of physics, though this is a
statement about faith in technological progress rather than a specific
hypothesis.

------
InclinedPlane
I 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.

~~~
qq66
SpaceX will not have 10 million people living on Mars in eighteen years,
whether you gave them a contract for $1 trillion or $10 trillion or $100
quadrillion.

~~~
mongol
Exactly. The global economy is not structured to achieve that at any price.

------
tptacek
Here's NASASPACEFLIGHT.COM making fun of this:

<http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28821.0>

~~~
lotharbot
Fantastic 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
To be fair, the shuttle is also a 60s design... So much for NASA engineers.

~~~
lotharbot
The 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.

------
gojomo
I believe the two largest items in the budget are:

$890 Billion - licensing fees to Roddenberry estate & Paramount

$67 Billion - overturning relativistic physics

------
gouranga
I'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
Continuing both themes, I'd rather spend the money to make us us Borg.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29>

~~~
gouranga
Indeed. 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
I 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
Society 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.

~~~
mahyarm
Change jobs, at least you don't have to prop up the insurance industry
anymore.

~~~
kitsune_
Currently, we're all propping up the insurance industry - There's no escape.

------
yaix
There is a DARPA financed project called the "100 Years Space Ship", that's
the real Enterprice building project.

<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."

------
joejohnson
A 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
Congratulations on copy and pasting from tptacek's link.

------
pdonis
Has 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>

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
I have posted a comment in the Build the Enterprise forums here:

[http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-
enterprise...](http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-enterprise-
is-it-technically-possible/reactor-power-seems-to-be-way-too-low#p776)

------
nextstep
Maybe 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
The faster than speed of light thing'll be hard aswell.

~~~
pavel_lishin
No worries, we'll just reverse the phase polarity.

~~~
systematical
That or use a heisenberg compensator.

~~~
Sapient
Or bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish!

------
leeoniya
"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
Actually, 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
well, there's this one under development
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-
could...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could-one-
day-power-39day-trips-to-mars.html)

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 :)

------
SkyMarshal
Isaac 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> (search for 'Escape' or 'the
brain')

------
toong
Besides 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/>

And you expect to build the frickin' USS Enterprise for 1 trillion ?

~~~
Sapient
It 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...

------
JabavuAdams
This 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?

------
existentialmutt
What, no kickstarter page?

~~~
tomjen3
Do 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
The 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>

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
Sorry. I had forgotten that it was the M3 they cancelled and not the M1.

------
simonh
So 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.

------
protomyth
If we are going to build a ship from fiction, we probably should start with
the Discovery One from 2001.

~~~
jasimq
I would like some pod racers from Star Wars first.

~~~
smacktoward
Or just the landspeeders! Imagine the savings on highway maintenance if we all
drove cars without wheels...

------
tomjen3
Thats 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.

------
WalterSear
Wow. There isn't even a space boom yet, and there's already a bubble for it.

------
moconnor
I 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.

------
madao
I 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.

------
technomancy
I eagerly await the inevitable arguments from TNG fans about why the
NCC-1701-D design is superior for this purpose.

------
civilian
If 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
Would 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
Yeah. 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
You 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/>

------
jamesflorentino
This 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.

------
hwillis
Fun 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
And this guy still wants it to have one-minute sustained output. He hasn't
provided anything that I consider a compelling reason for this.

~~~
kaybe
Lasers with a power this high only come pulsed as of now. Instead of
continually outputting it "collects" and gives the radiation in short pulses
(up to femtoseconds - 10^-15s), which, if you calculate the output (Energy
over time), gives you the high numbers.

------
sparknlaunch12
Wow. 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
> This has been deeply thought through.

It hasn't. Read tptacek's link to see why:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009591>

------
lumberjack
Personally 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
I 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
You 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
Humanity needs a jump start... again.

------
PaulHoule
Ho Hum.

What we need to do is sample return from the moon's north pole and see if
there really is a glacier there!

~~~
sp332
I think that will only excite scientists. Who cares about a bunch of water?
Bring back some high-grade Armalcolite ore, and you might spark some interest.

------
ddet
Why don't you build a fusion reactor instead?

------
guest
didn't they finish this thing in the eighties?

------
iRobot
Someone 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.

------
bashzor
If we're having trouble funding the Joint Strike Fighter, I don't see this
coming "off the ground" any time soon.

------
horsehead
will it have beaming capabilities? That's all i care for.

------
sevenstar
So we could have had 15 of these already ? <http://www.usdebtclock.org/>

