The new movie "Interstellar" is set in a not-so-distant future, but distant enough that they've managed to build something still elusive in 2014: a spaceship that can travel between solar systems. Such starships have been a technological mainstay in science fiction for decades, but they remain a crazily complicated proposition in everything from propulsion to human reproduction.
Still, that hasn't stopped researchers from trying. Last month, a bunch of rocket scientists, microbiologists and entrepreneurs gathered in Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center to discuss — in level and serious tones — how to become a spacefaring civilization.
The meeting is called the 100-Year Starship symposium, and it’s brought brains together once a year since 2011 to figure out what we need to do now if we want to have an interstellar spacerocket a century from now. The group has made progress defining the challenges and pointing their noses toward solutions, but much work remains (like, say, building a starship).
To quote Contact, it “sounds less like science and more like science fiction.” Nonetheless, the 100-Year Starship adherents—backed by NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—keep plugging away. At their most recent gathering, 7 major hurdles emerged from their three days of discussion.
