The 100 Year Starship: Issues & Challenges

The 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS) is an unprecedented, multi-disciplinary initiative that challenges humanity to identify commercially sustainable ways to design, develop, and build a manned vehicle for interstellar space travel within 100 years, by the year 2111.

Aside from the obvious technical challenge, there are numerous organizational challenges to mounting a multi-generational endeavor to launch a human Starship mission.  First and foremost is the need to develop a clear vision and mission statement for such an ambitious undertaking; the scope of such a mission is truly a global undertaking. 

Nevertheless, current and past multinational space projects demonstrate that there are additional obstacles inherent in such large scale international projects.  Particularly challenging is the difficulty of building international consensus on the very need to embark upon a multi-generational mission, and one whose core technology does not yet exist.  In the current globally hard-pressed financial environment, it will be difficult to obtain political support for a single massive project towards this goal.  

This suggests that it will be critical to move forward step by step, perhaps with shorter-term robotic analog Starship missions and commercial demonstrations.  Spreading knowledge of the threat of near-Earth objects, as exemplified in December 2011 with the near-collision with Asteroid 2005 YU55, shows that planetary defense should be an increasingly important driver of space investment, technology development, and exploration over the coming century.