100-Year Starship Program Receives First Grant From DARPA

The idea of interstellar travel has fascinated human minds since the beginning of time. From thousands of years ago, when man looked at the sky and created the idea of the heavens, to even more recently, when the first private spacecraft successfully launched on a mission to the International Space Station.  As futuristic as Star Trek's interstellar, intergalactic voyages may seem, attention is now being focused on making that a reality.

The 100-year Starship initiative, led by former astronaut and first black woman to travel into space Mae Jemison, received its first round of funding from DARPA.

They were awarded $500,000.

The 100-year Starship initiative's mission statement reads:

"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."

The first event for the project will take place in September in Houston. The symposium hopes to gather input from a variety of fields in order to successfully transplant our society to another planet. They are asking for submissions from engineers, physicists, engineers, doctors, sociologists, ethicists, public policy experts, and even writers. The symposium follows a similar one held by DARPA and NASA last September in Orlando.

But the 100-year Starship program's potential doesn't just lie with the ability to reach distant stars and planets. It could very well have an effect on life on Earth.

"Any solution we come up with requires understanding of how to generate and control huge amounts of energy," Jemison told InnovationNewsDaily. "It could also transform energy here on Earth."

One example is that in order to travel such great distances, there are two options. One is to sustain the energy needed to make 1,000 year voyages while maintaining complex biological life support systems. Another is to figure out how to travel incredibly, incredibly fast. Even the speed of light wouldn't be sufficient - the nearest spiral galaxy to us, Andromeda, is 2.6 million light years away.

To overcome this, a fundamental new way of physics is needed, said Marc Millis, a prominent physicist, at the symposium last September to FutureTense.

"You move one way and the universe moves the other way. If you start thinking about this, your head starts spinning. What are you pushing the universe relative to?"

And then there's the business side of a 100-year plan. The requirement for a constant flow of funds, along with inevitable political clashing might be harder to overcome than the actual issue itself.