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Spacecraft Designed That Could Carry 2,400 People on a 400-Year Trip to Alpha Centauri

They haven’t built a spacecraft for travelling to our nearest star system. But „Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri,“ reports LiveScience:

The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft. Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.

The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel.
Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing. The ship could theoretically be constructed in 20 to 25 years and retains gravity through constant rotation. The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors….
This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don’t yet exist.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article — and for sharing this observation…

„My first thought was that someone read Arthur C. Clarke’s book, Rendezvous with Rama and used it as a model design!“

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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