Build the Enterprise

I'd volunteer to work on it, if they guaranteed me that I'd never have to wear a red shirt.

I think you'd get the (Science Officer) blue shirt!

Well I guess you gotta start someplace, I imagine if a working design was ever to be completed in 100 years, it would not resemble the Starship Enterprise in anything other than name perhaps..

DARPA has already lit the fuse for the 100 year starship project, which I would put more credibility into than the Build the Enterprise version.

Still, it makes me wonder if an intra-solar system vessel is not a bad idea as well. I just think it would be wrong to constrain the design based on a 1960s science fiction TV show, no matter how romantic.

First step would be to define the mission of such a vessel in modest detail and then devolve those requirements into lower level requirements...

Well I would guess it to be an advertising gimmick to garner interest, albeit possibly short lived...

See now, this is another manifestation of that American, re-inventing the wheel. Why change a design that has worked so well over the years?

Seems like the gravity mechanism would create a gyroscopic effect making the ship hard to turn.

We could no more design a star ship now than the Wright Brothers could have started out with a 747 instead of the Wright Flyer. Design and engineering development is an incremental process. You have to learn to crawl before you can run. There are no short cuts.

True for a star ship. No so much for a trip within the solar system.

If there was a will and the funding to back it, two decades would be plenty of time to construct such a vessel. Although, I think it would have to be something much more practical than a ship that holds 1,000 passengers; more like a few dozen.

All of the technology already exists. The physics is done. Now it is simply an engineering task.

Unfortunately, the will to do something like that crumbled shortly after Apollo 11.

Hollywood has done a much more interesting job of creating evil aliens than NASA can present reality. In short, nobody cares.

There are no shortages of conceptual spacecraft for interplanetary travel. Here is one called Discovery II by a NASA think tank. It would seem that '2001 a Space Odyssey' was a direct inspiration.

Here is an image of the space craft:

All of the technology is not immediately to hand.

Fusion reactors are on back-order

It does not require fusion to hop planet to planet in our solar system.

Discovery II is just one of many conceptual designs. That one just happens to use a fusion reactor.