We attended the 100 Year Starship Symposium mostly out of curiosity. There’s not a lot of commonality between 100 Year Starship and Citizens in Space. We focus on making low-end, near-term applications of human spaceflight available to the average citizen. 100 Year Starship, on the other hand, is about as high-end and long-term as you can get. Still, we were curious to see how the 100 Year Starship organization was planning to approach such an audacious challenge.

For those who don’t know, the 100 Year Starship Initiative was created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), with additional funding from NASA. DARPA’s goal was to create a private-sector organization that would bring about the creation of a starship within the next 100 years. DARPA and NASA do not intend to fund the 100 Starship project themselves, beyond some initial seed funding ($500,000) to get it started. DARPA’s approach to this problem is innovative and interesting in itself.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDDRnrun2Ik&w=700]

Last year, DARPA sponsored the first 100 Year Starship Symposium and invited interested organizations to apply for the seed funding. After a short proposal period, DARPA awarded the seed money to a team led by the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, with Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development as team members. This year’s symposium was the first meeting run by the newly funded team.

The first thing we noticed was that the Symposium focused very heavily on the culture, outreach, and sociological aspects surrounding the project. We heard a number of attendees express concern that this focus was not what they thought DARPA was going to be funding. On the other hand, an argument could be made that technical work on interstellar flight is premature and the outreach and cultural work is the only thing that 100YSS can usefully do at this time. We aren’t sure that argument is wrong.

The technical sessions we attended were a bit unfocused. There does not seem to be any common agreement on what the 100 Year Starship goal actually means. We heard three distinct visions (with minor variations on each). One group wants to develop warp drive or some other form of faster-than-light travel, to get humans to the stars quickly. Another wants to build a big slower-than-light ship using relatively conventional fusion or antimatter propulsion. A third group would simply send a light-weight automated probe, propelled by an external laser or microwave beam. Any of these might be might be called a starship, but they are three very different concepts which imply very different development paths.

The unmanned probe is not all that far from our current capabilities, given some advances in nanotechnology (which are likely to be developed for other purposes in the next few decades) and the development of high-powered laser or microwave systems. A fusion or antimatter rocket, on the other hand, entails a formidable amount of engineering work, perhaps comparable to the Manhattan Project. The faster-than-light drive requires not just engineering work but theoretical physics breakthroughs. What research tasks 100YSS should be working on first will vary greatly depending on which of these approaches is chosen.

Right now, the choice seems to be “all of the above.” That’s fine for initial community building, but if the 100 Year Starship organization is going move beyond community building to produce an actual working starship, a choice will have to be made at some point. It is highly unlikely that 100YSS will be able to generate enough funds to carry all three through to fruition. (Carrying even one through will be challenging enough. We can’t think of any examples of successful projects that have lasted as long as 100 years, other than Medieval cathedrals. Cathedrals were not research-and-development projects, however. They were construction projects, and no cathedral ever approached the expected cost of a starship.)

We presume that one of the first tasks for the 100 Starship Initiative will be creating a roadmap for the work it intends to fund. Indeed, potential donors will almost certainly demand it. Someone will need to decide what “starship” means at that time.  It will be interesting to see how the community reacts when that happens. Not everyone will agree with the choice. (That’s true with any major decision on a large project.) Will the community hang together at that point or will it fragment? (And does it matter?)

Constructive Criticism

The 100 Year Starship still shows definite signs of immaturity. There were three statements which we heard repeatedly that tend to erode credibility.

I’ve done a preliminary estimate for this system. It will cost ___ billion dollars just to put it in orbit, given the best current launch costs.

Current launch costs are completely irrelevant in the context of the 100 Year Starship. No one is ever going to build a starship until launch costs go way down. (That applies to other megaprojects, such as lunar colonies and manned Mars expeditions, as well.) There is very good reason to expect launch costs will be dramatically reduced in the next 20 years, let alone 100.

We need to start working on ___ immediately if it’s going to be ready in time for the 100 Year Starship.

Project management is not an exact science. No engineer or project manager can look at something and say with any certainty that it will take 100 years, and not 80 or 120, to develop.

The desire for quick funding is quite understandable, especially when there bills to be paid. Giving the appearance of panic is not the way to get it, though. Anyone associated with a project as far our as the 100 Year Starship will be subject to ridicule from certain quarters, which makes it more important to be calm and measured in public statements.

When we go to the stars, we must leave behind our primitive human customs like ___ with us.

Utopian calls for social reform were heard frequently throughout the conference. They also showed up in the “report outs” from the workshops on the final day. One workshop leader recommended (in all seriousness) that the 100 YSS Initiative solve all of the world’s social problems in the next 100 years. “The long-term payoff is in solving the social problems first.”

Millennialism ran rampant. “Democracy is going to become near total,” someone predicted – the 100 Year Starship Initiative should bring about “the absolute end of dictatorship,” through some vague, unspecified means. It should also replace existing national institutions with “global culture, global currency, global government.”

The notion that advanced, starfaring civilizations must consist of perfect beings who have abandoned “primitive” behavior such as war harkens back to some bad science-fiction stories. It was popularized by Dr. Carl Sagan in the 1960’s and has become something of an article of faith in the SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) community, which he helped launch. Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute, recently took Prof. Stephen Hawking to task for suggesting this assumption might not be true.

We would certainly like to believe that advanced alien civilizations will be peaceful. We’d all better hope so, if we ever meet up with up. But wishes and hopes are not proof. As Carl Sagan famously said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and the Saganites have proved no evidence for (or against) this claim. It’s something of a secular religion, which is ironic since Sagan professed loudly to be an atheist devoid of religious belief.

As for transforming humans into benevolent, peaceful gods devoid of human frailty in the next hundred years – let’s have a reality check, please. The 100 YSS Initiative has a huge challenge ahead of it already, without taking on the task of trying to reform every society on Earth at the same time.

Such wild-eyed utopianism is not unique to the Interstellar movement (and its close cousin, the SETI movement). We saw and heard a lot of it from the space settlement movement, back in the 1970’s. The space-settlement movement has matured in the decades since then, and mostly grown out of it. The interstellar movement will need to do the same, if it’s to make any real progress.