An updated version (NASA, 1999) of theProject Orion by theUnited States government (1958-1965). It was the earliest scaled project developing a concept for a spaceship with a propulsion, offission pulses, that was to be capable to transport humanslight years within hundreds of years instead of thousands.
WhileNASA'sVoyager andPioneer probes have traveled into local interstellar space, the purpose of these uncrewed craft was specifically interplanetary, and they are not predicted to reach another star system;Voyager 1 probe andGliese 445 will pass one another within 1.6light years in about 40,000 years.[3] Several preliminary designs for starships have been undertaken throughexploratory engineering, usingfeasibility studies with modern technology or technology thought likely to be available in the near future.
Examined in an October 1973 issue ofAnalog, theEnzmann Starship proposed using a 12,000-ton ball of frozendeuterium to power pulse propulsion units. Twice as long as theEmpire State Building is tall and assembled in-orbit, the proposed spacecraft would be part of a larger project preceded byinterstellar probes and telescopic observation of target star systems.
Generation: Ships in which the destination would be reached by descendants of the original passengers. These ships would necessarily be self-sustaining and self-maintaining for possibly thousands of years. Notable examples of this in fiction are theGodspeed in Beth Revis' "Across the Universe" (and subsequent sequels), as well as theVanguard fromRobert A. Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky"
Relativistic: Ships that function by taking advantage oftime dilation at close-to-light-speeds, so long trips will seem much shorter (but still take the same amount of time for outside observers).
Frame shift: Ships that take advantage of the fact that certain dimensions are less "folded" than others, to allow shorter travel by shifting one'sframe of reference into a higher, more flat dimension to cut down on travel time, such as in science fiction with inter-dimensionalhyperspace. Generally this results in speeds close to (but importantly, not greater than) light speed.
Faster-than-light (FTL): A ship that functions by reaching a destination faster than the speed of light. While according to thespecial theory of relativity, faster-than-light travel is impossible, drives like awarp drive or using awormhole, that is in principle similar have been hypothesized.
Artist's depiction of a hypotheticalWormhole Induction Propelled Spacecraft, based loosely on the 1994"warp drive" paper ofMiguel Alcubierre
TheAlcubierre drive is a speculativewarp drive conjectured by Mexican physicistMiguel Alcubierre in a 1994 paper which has not beenpeer-reviewed.[9] The paper suggests that space itself could be topographically warped to create a local region of spacetime wherein the region ahead of the "warp bubble" is compressed, allowed to resume normalcy within the bubble, and then rapidly expanded behind the bubble creating an effect that results in apparent FTL travel, all in a manner consistent with the Einstein field equations ofgeneral relativity and without the introduction of wormholes.[10] However, the actual construction of such a drive would face otherserious theoretical difficulties.
There are widely known vessels in various science fiction franchises. The most prominent cultural use and one of the earliest common uses of the termstarship was inStar Trek: The Original Series.
