Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
by Nancy Atkinson
In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years. “We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.
This “Gen1” Enterprise could get to Mars in ninety days, to the Moon in three, and “could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse – rovers, special-built planes, and satellites.”
Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule, and almost every other imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. This Enterprise would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.
“It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station, and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once – either as crew members or as adventurous visitors.
While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system. Three additional nuclear reactors would create all of the electricity needed for operation of the ship.
The saucer section would be a .3 mile (536 meter) diameter rotating, magnetically-suspended gravity wheel that would create 1G of gravity.
The first assignments for the Enterprise would have the ship serving as a space station and space port, but then go on to missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, various asteroids and even Europa, where the ships’ laser would be used not for combat but for cutting through the moon’s icy crust to enable a probe to descend to the ocean below.
Of course, like all space ships today, the big “if” for such an ambitious effort would be getting Congress to provide NASA the funding to do a huge 20-year project. But BTE Dan has that all worked out, and between tax increases and spreading out budget cuts to areas like defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education and energy, the cuts to areas of discretionary spending are not large, and the tax increases could be small. “These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic,” says the website. “In fact, these will barely be noticed. It’s amazing that a program as fantastic as the building a fleet of USS Enterprise spaceships can be done with so little impact.”
“The only obstacles to us doing it are the limitations we place on our collective imagination,” BTE Dan adds, and his proposal says that NASA will still receive funding for the science, astronomy and robotic missions it currently undertakes
But he proposes not just one Enterprise-class ship, but multiple ships, one of which can be built every 33 years – once per generation – giving three new ships per century. “Each will be more advanced than the prior one. Older ships can be continually upgraded over several generations until they are eventually decommissioned.”
BTE Dan, who did not respond to emails, lists himself as a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years.
The website includes a blog, a forum and a Q&A section, where BTE Dan answers the question, “What if someone can prove that building the Gen1 Enterprise is beyond our technological reach?”
Answer: “If someone can convince me that it is not technically possible (ignoring political and funding issues), then I will state on the BuildTheEnterprise site that I have been found to be wrong. In that case, building the first Enterprise will have to wait for, say, another half century. But I don’t think that anyone will be able to convince me it can’t be done. My position is that we can – and should – immediately start working on it.”
Many will tell you we could better spend the money here on Earth as opposed to just tossing it off into space. They'll tick off items like everyone on earth could be fed, war materials are more valuable to us than junket vacations across space, and the enviroment could use some cash inflow rather than space exploration.
My reasons are different in that respect. The reasons I would love to see this, isn't so much getting to other worlds (though that is a great reason by itself) but rather for the tech advances it would drive and one other critical item no one wants to talk about.
The item no one wants to talk about is non-renewable resources. Once they are gone, they aren't coming back. My point in this is that once they are going or getting scarce, we will not get off this planet. Past history shows us, we aren't safe here. 5 greater extinctions have occurred here and we could be number 6. Time lines seem to line up that every 26 to 30 million years or so, one of these extinctions hit. We are not dead for sure exactly how many but they range from the lower number of 5 to an upper number of 20. Most accept the 5 without issue. But the ELE (Extinct Level Events) when they occur from past records show anything from 89% to 50% extinction levels of all life on Earth dying. Somewhere out there is something that is causing this with near clock like regularity we don't know about. If the past is anything to go by, it will happen again.
The problem with non-renewable being used completely up can be partially eliminated by space mining. Some is questionable such as oil based but indications are that even this may be mining through some of the moons. Metals can be found in space that we have few of, such as platinum, an element that isn't found on earth in near pure form, other than from meteorites. One such that rare on earth but appears to be in abundance on the moon is He-3, an isotope used as fuel in fusion reactors we're just coming up with but have not worked out all the details yet. Rare earths is guesstimated to become near consumed by 2017. Indications are that there are more rare earths on the moon. Antimony, zinc, tin, silver, lead, indium, gold, and copper are expected to be exhausted within 50 or 60 years at present usage rates.
All the gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, and tungsten mined from the Earth's crust, and that are essential for economic and technological progress, came originally from the rain of asteroids that hit the Earth after the crust cooled. So more is out there if we can get to it. Mining here on earth only gives forth about 12% of all material removed from a mine in ore they are seeking. Asteroid mining the returns are more in line with 80 to 90% purity rates making any find a motherlode compared to how much work is taken to get it out of the earth.
Even more valuable than scarce resources are the spin off technologies that doing such a project would give us. We can't begin to guess where it would all head in spin offs. Past technological spin offs from space endeavors to orbit the earth and get to the moon gave us tons of new stuff, much of it in our everyday lives.
Here is a small list of space spin offs...
- HICOM - a central terminal for mobile phones
- Hubble Space Telescope
- Foamless toothpaste
- Composite materials
- Space Suit Technology
- Programmable Pace Maker
- Insulation advances
- Lightning warning system
- NACA6 Airfold - Material for lightweight helmets like bicycle helmets
- Mowers, suction systems - improvements in design and construction of them
- Hand tool and drill - cordless systems
- Antigravity pens
- Ceramic Teeth braces
- Airbags
- Insulin pumps
- Olympic Caliber swimsuits
- Memory metals
- Stents
- Medical implants
- Sharper than steel scalpels
- Preformance enhancing golf clubs
- Flexible wire rims for sunglasses
- Glass coatings on lenses
- Liquid metals
- Athletic shoes with new cushioning materials
- Healthcare monitoring devices
- Temperature sensing improvements
- Artificial heart pumps
- Shock absorbent foams
- New materials
- Humidity sensors (new methods)
This is just a very, very, small list. No mention of computers, calculators, software, satellites for weather and environmental sensing, tons of medical advances, drugs, this list just barely scratches the surface of what the space effort has returned to us for everyday use.
...Build a Real Starship Enterprise...
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