DARPA to award Starship Study grant on 11/11/11

[bananas]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/science/space/18starship.html?ref=science

Offering Funds, U.S. Agency Dreams of Sending Humans to Stars
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: August 17, 2011

Alpha Centauri or bust.

The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars.

In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

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[n2doc]

1. as they say, timing is everything n/t

[jimlup]

2. I don't exactly know how to think about this...

1. Why exactly is DARPA funding this? Are they claiming to be worried about attacks from aliens?

2. Why when we are talking about cutting SS and Medicare are we funding this? I'm all for it except that I keep hearing about how the nation has no money.

3. Maybe this is actually exactly what we need. Maybe this could be our stimulus. We could invest 50 trillion in a crash program to get people to the nearest star - it would certainly be more constructive than spending it on wars and it would meet Krugman's requirement of a desperately needed stimulus and better than digging holes and refilling them.

[Occulus]

3. Well,

1) DARPA funds many propjects, and a study to send mankind to the stars is just the sort of thing DARPA was intended for

2) $500,000 is a meaningless amount compared to the budgets we're talking about in SS/Medicare/Medicaid- it's less than a rounding error

3) There's the possibility that discoveries could be made going down this road that would get us there faster. That alone is worth the money

[jimlup]

5. DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

I'm actually a qualified scientist so I know full well what DARPA is and does. My concern is that this research is in fact not Defense related at all. Why isn't this in the NSF or DOE budget instead. I'm not happy seeing DARPA get an even bigger slice of the pie than it already has. And I did state that I understood that $500k was a drop in the bucket. But it is the principle of the thing really. I'm a little more than pissed that this goes to DARPA. It doesn't belong there frankly. And furthermore we really shouldn't be spending anything no matter how small if we are cutting SS and Medicare. I'm sorry but that is just the way I feel about it. I don't see this research as particularly valuable or practical even in the long term. The nation will likely cease to exist before we are likely do actually fund this for real. And what the hell does this have to do with defense?

On the other hand maybe we could use it as stimulus (which our economy desperately needs). A crash program to the stars would certainly be better than digging holes and refilling them and it would stimulate the economy. (This is partially tongue in cheek.)

[BadgerKid]

4. DARPA is DoD.

My guess is someone, somewhere, sold the military brass on such a set of ideas.