[ExI] Request for Information (RFI) 100 Year Starship Study

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 6:36 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> I can do orbit mechanics and weight estimations, or double check your
> estimates.  Would that help?

For a high level view of a 100 year plan, we should probably leave
out that level of detail.  It is a given that orbit and Earth escape
velocity can be achieved by some means; the exact details of
space elevator vs. laser boost vs. whatever will have to be a
footnote - if even that much.

I'm thinking more, the long term organizational plan - that which
sets up the environment that encourages the people doing this to
do cutting edge research, because it's in their own self interest.
Mainly, it's about setting something up where the regulations,
environmental concerns, and established powers that hobble such
research presently, are not in the way.

If you want to help me with that...?

> The DARPA people sometimes come up with funds for studies, but this is the
> tightest budget time I have ever seen.  Might still be worth a try.

Yeah.  Launching even one object - required, at some point, for a
starship project - requires more than the entire budget, as does
researching manufacturing capabilities sufficient to make
anything capable of replicating itself using purely lunar or
asteroidal resources using only a significant fraction of a small
launch vehicle's payload.  Thus, this will have to attract more
resources and investment while everything's on the ground.

Phase one is all about getting a self-sufficient effort up and
running.

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have thought about this problem and come up with many, many
> solutions over the past several decades.
>
> It's a nearly hopeless effort.
>
> The problem is that the technical base keeps changing.

This is a 100 year effort.  The limits and specifics of today's
technology are largely irrelevant.  (The limits of physics are
relevant, but today's tech rarely actually gets to that limit in
areas of concern.)

> Another problem is finding anyone interested in going.  Those who go
> would be cut off from social acceleration.

FTL travel will likely be necessary.  There are a few possible
means of achieving that known today - but seeing which (if any)
actually prove possible at all, and then turning them from merely
possible into practical - will take a lot of work.  And, of course, it
is a gamble: it may well turn out that FTL is impossible.  But
currently, nobody is seriously willing to even explore the field.
After all, even if someone invented a method of teleporting from
Earth orbit to Mars orbit tomorrow that merely cost $100 million to
build, it would be nearly impossible to raise that amount of money.
That itself is a problem, which DARPA appears to be trying to
address here.