If You Build It...

The folks at this website have laid out a detailed plan for building a spaceship to Mars that looks like the real U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek. Obviously, barring some unforeseen technological advances in the next 20 years or so, it wouldn't have faster-than-light warp drive engines or be crewed by alien species and humans alike. But it would travel through the space between ourselves and our next outermost neighbor.

According to the project dreamers, building such a ship would help us move past the one-shot "cross the finish line" mentality that has dominated most of humanity's manned space exploration. Other than the handful of astronauts who are onboard the International Space Station, nearly every space mission crewed by human beings has aimed at hitting a milestone, leaving a built-in letdown once the milestone is reached. Remember that the Apollo 13 astronauts broadcast from their spacecraft before their problems and the networks didn't even air it, even though it was less than two years since the first moon landing.

A ship such as Build-the-Enterprise.org envisions would be a permanent spacegoing presence with regular, repeated work, like ferrying expeditions to Mars and even perhaps to other planets as missions became necessary. The estimated cost -- $1 trillion over 20 years -- sounds like a lot of money. Or at least it used to. But in reality it is quite a bit of money, even if the $50 billion annual price tag is somewhere in the middlin' range of government expenditures. There are worse ways to spend that money, which we have done, are doing and will no doubt continue to do.

Now, is it a pipe dream? Probably. Is it seriously, seriously nerdy, maybe even to the event horizon of nerdiness beyond which nothing can be seen? I guess it is. Could NASA, an agency whose dreamers are constrained by self-aggrandizing political poseurs and whose mindset more and more matches up with the "Administration" part of its acronym rather than the "Space" part, actually mount the imagination needed to grasp at a horizon this far out? Maybe, maybe not.

But it's always nice to know someone still thinks big.

(H/T Jonathan Last)