With going to the stars, we may have to change the frame a little. See the journey as the destination.
It's all very well accelerating up to some significant fraction of lightspeed with your ion drive, but what happens when you get the other end? You're going to have to spend a long time slowing down again!
And I hate to think what damage a piece of space rock would do to a ship designed for max speed.
The idea of inter-stellar commuting is probably not the right paradigm
No. What humans need is a slowboat to the stars, a true new "planet" ('wanderer') where generations will live out their lives entirely in deep space, occasionally dropping off populations to colonise whatever potential planets they find along the way
I reckon we need to find a reasonable size asteroid, and mine the heck out of it, then build a full-on planetary habitat inside, complete with all the good old sci-fi mod cons like rotational gravity simulations and fusion-based ecosystems.
Once we've got one of those, we need to strap on some good ol' power sources, fill her up with about 1000 suitable volunteers (could be a good way to reduce the prison population. That didn't work out too badly for Australia!) and let her chug on out for who knows where.
Rather put the funds into life extension so the rest of us can still be around to hear about what happens.

One of the frequently discussed problems of deep space missions is the absence and necessary creation of artificial gravity. I have seen dozens of designs, rotating space-wheels and the like. What I've never seen and seems much simpler and economical is an enclosed platform tethered perpendicular to a lead weight that revolve around a common center. Instrumentation could be at the axis point on the tether for stability.

It is good to have people thinking about this and we should fund it fully, but we've got a solar system to settle first. That project needs even more funding and the goals involved are more reachable with current technology.
It would be a sad thing if we spent too much time working on interstellar travel and not local expansion while a killer asteroid approaches. We have an urgent need to spread out and many of the biggest threats on the risk matrix can be dealt with by colonizing other locations in our solar system. We will then be standing in a strong position to make bigger treks.
Regardless of whether we get going to other stars in a hundred years or a thousand, it is imminent that we will have settled the galaxy in about a million years, perhaps much less. That is, of course, if we aren't destroyed before we get started.
We really need to avoid things that slow the initial steps of expansion like focusing on far-sighted ideas and ignoring what we know how to do now. We need to assume there are no aliens, for instance, until one comes and says hello (or tries to kill us). Space is not reserved to these "ghosts" and we shouldn't respect the territory of non-entities. Spending money looking for aliens does nothing to protect us from our threats or to get us out into space.
I say Space-Ward Ho!! first the Moon, then Mars, the Asteroids and everything else in the solar system. I figure by then some group will have already started in on the project this article is about. We should do that too, buts lets not get the cart ahead of the horse.
We need to get up into **NEAR-SPACE** and settle there first and nothing should distract us from that goal. The need to guarantee human survival trumps all other objectives. Only then should we go interstellar.

"What humans need is a slowboat to the stars, a true new "planet" ('wanderer') where generations will live out their lives entirely in deep space, occasionally dropping off populations to colonise whatever potential planets they find along the way"
What do you think Earth is?......

Well, as for aliens, I think we will probably not find any. Distance is a problem but, time is also a problem. It would be almost impossible to find them distance-wise; if that were possible then we are left with the problem of finding them within the right timeframe. Will we arrive before they are there or after they're gone? Our space and time coordinates have to be just right.
I think a generational ship is our only option unless we make suspended animation and longevity discoveries in the next 100 years or so.

The solution to interstellar travel cannot be some percentage of light speed, distances are much to great and lifespans are far to short. There is another way, warp drive. Alcubierre warp drive has been shown to be possible requiring much less energy than originally thought. The White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer now set up at Johnson Space Center is testing the technology right now to essentially create micro warps in space-time.

re; Nickov8
While it turns out that the gas mix in interstellar space is wrong for using a Bussard ramjet for propulsion the ram scoop does work but creates more drag than ion engines will produce with the collected mass but for braking the ram scoop will lower your velocity faster than your ion engines and fill your tanks with reaction mass for tooling around in the destination solar system or accelerating to the next solar system.
Larry Niven used the term "Slowboat" for his sublight starships the idea of which he stole and modified a little from Robert Heinlein "Universe ships". The fastest sublight starship you can imagine is a slowboat.
If I build a starship I have a better use for it than giving criminals a reward that many hard working honest people dream of.

Can we have some 3D Visuals & sims for the audience. Desktop scale models of concepts etc Be nice to see

@techmanmacho
Yes ... but we seem to be stuck in a bit of a loop

The trouble is that any ship we launch with todays technology will take so long to reach its destination that a ship built many years ( or centuries ) later is almost certain to get there first. I think we need to find some means of travelling faster than light. There are still loopholes in our knowledge. I suggest waiting to see what properties anti-matter has. We still do not know for certain how it is affected by gravity, and if that is in the opposite direction it should be possible to build an anti-matter ship that continues accelerating by repulsion of matter. I think that maybe the reason we see so little anti-matter is that it was repulsed by matter (probably surrounding the galaxies) , maybe as an alternative explanation to dark matter.