The US Defense and NASA has completed a workshop on the constructioon of a spaceship to reach our nearest neighbor stars. They now call for ".. ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle."

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the NASA Ames Research Center announced their 100-Year Starship Study in October. This study is examining the business model needed to develop and mature technologies that would enable long-distance manned space flight a century from now. Anticipated to last one year, the study kicked off in January with a Strategic Planning Workshop.

"For generations, people have been excited and inspired by exploration," said Dave Neyland, Director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. "This study hopes to inspire research of interstellar space travel, something with a very long time horizon. Through it, we hope to excite and encourage a younger generation that was not yet born when man first walked on the moon."

The workshop brought together 29 visionaries with diverse backgrounds from aerospace engineer to science fiction author. Their mission was to steer efforts to develop a business model, establish a charter and develop the organizational construct needed to affect this long-term strategy. Over the course of two days, members met and discussed the requirements for seeding research that would enable interstellar flight.

"We picked the 100-Year Starship name because it would require a long-range sustainable effort to get our species to other stars," said Neyland. "Looking at history, most significant exploration, like crossing oceans or continents for the first time, was sponsored by patrons or groups outside of government. We’re here because we’d like to start with a mechanism that gets this long-range project out of the government, and make sure it is an energized and self-sustaining enterprise."

The 100 Year Starship Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible. The genesis of this study is to foster a rebirth of a sense of wonder among students, academia, industry, researchers and the general population to consider “why not” and to encourage them to tackle whole new classes of research and development related to all the issues surrounding long duration, long distance spaceflight. DARPA contends that the useful, unanticipated consequences of such research will have benefit to the Department of Defense and to NASA, and well as the private and commercial sector.

Such an endeavor will require an understanding of questions such as: how do organizations evolve and maintain focus and momentum for 100 years or more; what models have supported long term technology development; what resources and financial structures have initiated and sustained prior settlements of “new worlds?”
DARPA is supported in this effort by NASA

Source: DARPA