The final frontier? Trillion-dollar plan to build Starship Enterprise

[heisenberg]

In its time, the original Star Trek series has inspired many inventions – the flip-open mobile phone (based on the crew's communicators), handheld medical diagnostics (based on its tricorder) – but now an engineer of 30 years standing says we should go the whole way and build the Starship Enterprise.The cost? A trillion dollars (£648bn) – but if spread over 20 years, argues "Dan", who has proposed the idea, it would cost only 0.27% of the US's gross domestic product, or about half what the Apollo project did in the 1960s.
"Just look how many young people were inspired to study engineering by the character Scotty from Star Trek," he writes on the websitebuildtheenterprise.org, which was set up to push the idea. "Well, I bet a lot of young people would be inspired if we actually built the first generation of /Scotty's ship/."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/01/final-frontier-starship-enterprise-plan

 

[Overmind One]

Interesting! I would love it if we took on an endeavor like that.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/01/final-frontier-starship-enterprise-plan

I love the concept, but I dont love the 1.5 gw nuclear power plant. I think that fusion needs to be developed before building a true Enterprise reality. Even an ion drive powered by massive hydrogen fuel cells would be far more efficient:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ozKUXiAs1Q


Or even a plasma rocket (can you say WARP CORE?). This plasma source could be used to generate power instead of for thrust, thus allowing for multi-gigawatt ion thrust. Even so, ion engines could, if continuously firing, reach a sizeable portion of lightspeed. Believe it or not, there were similar discussions about Enterprise ever being a reality in the 1970s before Trek came alive again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIg6pWwezEU&feature=fvwrel

 

[Gatefan1976]

the VASIMR is the engine that they are currently looking at IIRC.

 

[Overmind One]

the VASIMR is the engine that they are currently looking at IIRC.

Yes. That is it firing in the second video on the bottom. It has been in development for more than 3 decades