Building The Gen1 USS Enterprise, Really

And now for some fun thinking outside the box about what we could do in space when ignoring the issues of politics and funding ...

The BuildTheEnterprise (BTE) website describes how to build the first USS Enterprise spaceship, based on technologies within our reach, over the next twenty years.

It has 1g gravity, shielding for missions away from earth, can hold a 1000 people, and can enable the building of large underground bases on Mars and the moon also with 1g gravity. So what are we waiting for?

http://www.buildtheenterprise.org

Cheers,
BTE-Dan

Don't forget the 100 Mw "lasers" that come standard.

Hmm, I completely missed this topic (that's why I opened another one on the subject in the spaceflight cafe viewtopic.php?f=16&t=12282 ). Maybe a mod can merge the topics?

My bad. I didn't look for it in the technology forum, because imho it isn't really about technology. It's more about a general idea of what could be done with (more or less) already available technology.


But speaking of technology: I see a major design flaw of this Enterprise: The 3 nuclear reactors have exactly the same output power, as the engines require as input power. Question: how do you power the rest of the ship while the engines are running? I'm sure you are not planning to run on "emergency power" all the time?

My math skills stop at the back of the envelope calculations.

And since i am interested in crowd sourcing insanely large budget projects:

Their 1 trillion budget over 20 years means 50 billion a year.

If we brake that down to daily coinage that is:
136,986,301 dollars.

Now if we could find the same amount of people willing to donate 1 dollar a day on average for 20 years, cashing out 7300 dollars a head by the end /if my calculation was correct/, then we could possibly do it.

I doubt any government or private industry would spend money on this.

Well they would, but only if the public had a large scale and continued interest first.

The funny thing is you cant get large scale support without some sort of positive feedback to grow the crowd to that scale.

Somehow attracting more and more people, as the crowd increases in size.

Also it would be possible to fund it with smaller crowd but we would need higher average daily and overall cost.

I wonder what the science behind that is.

What would be the treshold of space enthusiasts willing to pay for this on the long term if this was a serious project.

Well ok it is a serious project, but what i mean if it had large scale support already.

Because it is even possible that once the crowd is large enough, positive feedbacks could increase the amount each spends on this.

You see more success, you feel the goal closer, you want to spend more money on it to get there sooner.

I don't know.

Any field of science already dealing with this?

Is it economics? Sociology?
Combination?

The problem I have with this idea is that it reminds me of the Space Shuttle. The vehicle is an end in itself. The form of it is an arbitrary objective. The expense is justified by making it do everything, but it will do nothing well, cost-effectively or soon. It becomes a massive resource sink that prevents any other work being done.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are not going to sit on their dainty little hands and wait for you to get back to the Moon and on to Mars with this contraption; they will just get there before you. Long before you. Oh, you want to stop that by inviting them to join your effort? Will they agree to being held back? I sincerely hope not.

/signed


@ box
Please, if you realize, that you forgot a little item in your post, then use the power of the edit function instead of making 3 or more posts in a row, especially if it is only one extra sentence.

I agree as well.

It is a project for a 100 billion or 1000 billion strong inter planetary civilisation, not a barely 7 billion one that is stuck on the planet and in poverty like we have now.

The design and engineering of such a project becomes trivial and cheap once you reach those technological and economical levels.

We just need to convince them that they need to pick some arbitrary, completely inappropriate object to model their space craft on. Perhaps a long sunk WWII Japanese battleship?

A very large ship floating in space is a base, a true space exploration mission would be slinging a quantum linked Hubble at voyager speeds and send 16 or so in every direction, and mapping everything first so you know where to go.

Sorry about that. I will probably slow down as i settle in, i was just too excited the past 2 weeks.

Though i have to say the whole ranking system doesn't help, it makes me want to go through all the threads and try make relevant comments.

Regarding this project:
If we ignore the end result, this project still could be potentially beneficial because of all the manufacturing/engineering/design that would be driven by it.

We would have to build an in orbit assembly facility, and we would need to have hundreds if not thousands of people working and living up there. Which would mean we would need to build a small LEO colony for this.

We would also need facilities on the ground to build and launch the parts.

Once the ship is ready we would have the infrastructure to build other stuff as well.

So the project isn't completely without a benefit.

Though i guess we could do all that while building less expensive ships in orbit.

How could we optimise the distribution of these ground facilities?

Would it make sense to have it all right where the launch sites are?
Assuming that it would be a global effort.

Would we need several launch facilities or just one?

Or should we use already built facilities and just transport everything to the launch sites?

My mind wanders off so easily on tangents, i should be focusing on the crowd funded space program i came here to discuss.

Ok I hate to be a wet blanket and I do believe it is good to talk about these ideas I think the concept is far too far away to to consider realistically.
Once we can get people into orbit for onehundred thousand dollars a seat space will truly open up. Till the we are just fantasising.
I read "somewhere" that at the price of $100K per seat, trips would sell to a large enough population (I can't remember the numbers) to create a large scale, multi billion dollar passenger transport business. After that and only till then will any "Enterprise" be built.
It is fun to dream about the Sailboat. When we find a way to get to the shore, build a shipyard, build a dock and get people there cheaply and safely we can stop dreaming.
Let's concentrate on getting to orbit.

What kind of countermass are they considering to neutralize the torque induced by that Gravity Wheel? Also, that's a 60s design by a guy with a lot of buzzwords, and not a lot of practical physics background. Those pylons to the rocket nacelles would have to be pretty strong, and the thrust is nowhere near the central axis, so it would turn loopty loops rather than fly straight. Kinda how the spin of the habitat ring would swing the whole body around slowly.

"Ur doin it wrong, Do a barrel roll!"

As long as I'm spending hypothetical dollars, I'd rather work on theoretically a practical design.

To me, Science Fiction is about the Future we could eventually see, not a past that never happened. You might want to try Fantasy.

Oh, and Actually {Glasses push) you're talking aboutthe Enterprise C, which was the third generation Starship in that series.