Hammy starship captain not included

Sure, it’s not 2245 yet, but why let that stop us from getting a jump on building a vessel to seek out new life and new civilizations? To boldly go where only television serials have gone before? io9 talked about one engineer who thinks not only can we build our own Enterprise in the next 20 years, we absolutely should start the process right-the-frak-now.

Emily briefly touched on this last night, but this is so cool it deserves its own post.

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.

Pipe dream? No doubt it is, but it certainly is fun to imagine. Hey, who knows? Maybe if we actually fund space exploration beyond low-earth Orbit, we could have something crazy awesome like this. As Neil Degrasse Tyson says, we just have to be bold.