starship-design: unmanned missions

[David Levine <david@actionworld.com>]

Well, one of the initial assumptions we made was that some kind of
simple unmanned mission (a fly-through) had already been sent to the
target.

Basically, it was decided early on that designing a manned mission would
be the more interesting challenge and so we could decide on any
arbitrary circumstances that would allow us to design one.  The only
caveat being that we discuss current technology or technology within the
realm of possibility over the next fifty or so years (in other words, no
FTL, etc).

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons we WON'T be sending manned
missions to other stars in the next fifty years (ah, how nice to be
proven wrong, though!) - economic being a big one - but for the sake of
argument, and for the sake of actually designing something, we must
ignore those reasons.

Another alternative would be to push the mission further into the
future, but the further away we make it in time, the more speculative
things get.

------------------------------------------------------
David Levine                     david@actionworld.com
Director of Development    http://www.actionworld.com/
ActionWorld, Inc.                       (212) 387-8200
Professional Driver.  Closed Track.  Do not attempt.