Setting our sights on the stars

Researchers explore the technology needed for star flight

• By Michael Hardy
• Nov 01, 2010

No one alive today is likely to see the dawn of travel among the stars, but two of the government's premiere research agencies are aiming to make that happen in a century.

The 100-Year Starship study, a joint venture of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA, will study the technology needed for star flight and business models that could make it financially feasible.

Sending manned craft to the moon and unmanned probes to the planets in our solar system was a monumental achievement, but star flight would be many orders of magnitude beyond that. The moon is only about 250,000 miles away. The nearest star, Proxima centauri, is 4.2 light-years ... or 24.6 trillion miles.

The project's goal "will require sustained investments of intellectual and financial capital from a variety of sources," DARPA officials wrote in a news release. "The year-long study aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment to ensure continuity of the lengthy technological time horizon needed."

Paul Eremenko, DARPA coordinator for the study, said it is the beginning of an effort to ignite interest in the topic that will engender research that will span mutiple generations and many fields of science.