If you've ever fancied yourself a spaceship architect that could design a vessel to carry colonists to another star system on a journey that could last for centuries, check out the Project Hyperion Design Contest, which invites teams to lay out their Generation Ship plans.
There's been a lot of talk about protecting humanity from an extinction event like a giant asteroid hitting the Earth by colonizing other worlds as an insurance policy. The problem with this is that there's no other place in the solar system capable of sustaining human life, so the obvious next step is to find a new home on a planet in another system.
Unfortunately, as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, space is big. Really big. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri and it's 4.246 light years away. To give it some perspective, the most distant space probe ever launched, Voyager 1, would take 70,000 years to cover that distance – and it's going in completely the wrong direction.
If we stay within the laws of physics, things like hyperspace, warp drive, Erhaft generators and other science fiction staples are off the board and we're stuck with not many options that don't rely on technologies that simply don't exist.
The most likely contender for humans reaching another star is what is called a Generation Ship. Originally conceived by US rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, this is a gigantic space ark like an enclosed, self-sustaining world complete with its own ecology and capable of fulfilling all the requirements of its crew as they take centuries or even millennia to reach their destination.
At the moment, this isn't much more than a thought experiment and fodder for a pile of science fiction novels, movies, television series, and radio plays. That's not surprising because even if one stays within the laws of physics, such a ship would require technological advances like being able to build a spacecraft miles long that can generate fantastic amounts of power and reach velocities at least 10% of the speed of light.
The challenges of even designing a Generation Ship are daunting, to put it mildly. The energy requirements needed to propel such a craft could mean that the passengers would have to resign themselves to living their entire lives in extremely cramped quarters. There's also the problem of building a vessel and its systems that can be relied upon to operate flawlessly for centuries – not to mention capable of maintaining and recycling things like air and water with perfect efficiency and zero leakage into space.
This doesn't even address the task of keeping the crew healthy, mentally stable, and not trying to exterminate each other for generations. This would require meticulous social engineering – something that has never had a good track record.
Nevertheless, Project Hyperion is keen enough on the idea to turn it into a design contest. Founded in 2011, Hyperion has been studying the feasibility of Generation Ships and has now opened up the job to the public. The new challenge is seeking multidisciplinary teams that include at least one architectural designer, engineer, and social scientist to come up with a design for a habitat capable of a 250-year voyage that can meet the requirements of architecture, life-support systems, societal structure, and adaptability across generations for a crew of about 1,000 people using technologies that have already been validated as a concept.
Each team is expected to deliver a 30-page booklet, sketches, rendering, technical diagrams, and design descriptions. These will be evaluated for various architectural criteria, the ability to provide artificial gravity and radiation shielding, and capability of adapting to cultural and biological changes in the crew.
According to Project Hyperion, registration is open with submission deadlines for phase 1 on February 2, 2025 and phase 2 on May 4. Cash prizes range from honorary mentions to a grand prize of US$5,000. Winners will be announced on June 2, 2025.
Source: Project Hyperion
