Jul 31st 2025|4 min read
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THE USS Enterprise they are not. One looks like a magic-marker pen, except that it is 58km long. The second, a pair of conjoined Ferris wheels. And the third, a giant jellyfish. They are, nevertheless, the winners of what may be the world’s first serious (or, at least, semi-serious) competition to design a ship to boldly go where no one has gone before, and settle a planet circling another star.
These three designs, chosen from around 100 entries that resembled everything from rugby balls to caddis-fly larvae, are those the competition’s organisers thought most likely to be able to make the journey intact, and without the crew (or their distant descendants) murdering each other. As the rules required the use of only existing or “near-future” technology, no light-speed travel or suspended animation was permitted. In other words, the journey would take centuries, and passengers were not allowed to sleep through it.
The organisers themselves are a group called the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), an international band of enthusiasts led by Andreas Hein. Dr Hein is a professor of space-systems engineering at the University of Luxembourg, and the others have day jobs ranging from physics to science-fiction writing. Fittingly, their nerve-centre is an office in the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society, an organisation whose objective of developing space travel looked equally eccentric when it was set up in 1933, but which proved to be right in the end.
The winning designs, too, hark back to the 20th century. The magic marker, called Chrysalis, is mostly a fuel tank with a 3km-long cylinder inside. Inspired by the ideas of Gerard O’Neill, who published plans for cylinder-based habitats in 1974, the crew of Chrysalis would live and work on the inner surfaces of a set of concentric cylinders, experiencing Earth-like gravity as these rotated round a central axis. To stop the system yawing about, team Chrysalis have built it out of contra-rotating sections.
The jellyfish, Proximum to its friends, relies on a pair of Stanford tori, donut-shaped spacecraft also devised in the 1970s, and also designed to generate gravity through rotation. Its designers have buried these 1.6km-diameter structures in a highly sculpted and modified asteroid (the bell of the jellyfish) to protect the living quarters from radiation and space dust. Unlike Chrysalis, Proximum would not carry all its fuel with it, but would get what it needed by making stops on the journey at refuelling stations sent out in advance.
Hyperion, meanwhile (pictured above), is a 500-metre-diameter version of the twin-wheel space station seen in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Its living space is a series of six “neighbourhoods”, three in each rim. Although outlining a fuel supply was, surprisingly, not part of the competition’s brief, attaching a Chrysalis-like tank to it would not be that hard.
All three designs are fitted out with housing, factories, offices, hospitals, schools, sports arenas, public meeting spaces and, of course, farms. Power comes from fusion reactors. And propulsion is provided by yet-to-be-developed devices bearing names such as direct-fusion drives and nuclear-pulse engines. Dilithium crystals, however, were not included.
Photograph: Courtesy Project Hyperion / Chrysalis
Photograph: Courtesy Project Hyperion / Systema Stellare Proximum
When it comes to the proposed social arrangements, however, things are much less clear. To predict how future generations would hold up under the journey’s strain, the Proximum proposal invokes Strauss-Howe generational theory (which apparently holds that history unfolds in a recurring cycle of “turnings”, each roughly 20-25 years long and associated with four different generational archetypes: prophet, nomad, hero, artist). The inhabitants of Chrysalis would rely on something called liquid sociocracy governance to maintain order. And those of Hyperion would enjoy “an economic system rooted in rational resource management and collective development over profit”.
If all this social engineering doesn’t help keep the peace, there is always artificial intelligence. As Team Proximum puts it, “We can expect the living passengers to never be the most intelligent or capable of the sentient beings on board.”
The upshot, some hybrid between a Marxist paradise and Thomas More’s “Utopia”, might hold out for a generation or two, while things were run by the idealistic pioneers and their children. Whether it would last any longer is moot. A thousand people—I4IS’s suggested initial crew size—is a lot to coop up in an enclosed space. Social fragmentation seems likely, especially in the absence of any external threat to encourage unity.
Arguably the most serious failure to address reality, though, is lack of consideration of the Darwinian imperative to reproduce. Some teams have rules intended to control and equalise reproductive output. But they are less clear about who does the enforcing, and by what means. This is, however, an imagined future in which earlier economic growth and technological progress has created the ability to build such ships in the first place. Maybe, in a world of such abundance, the current trend for small families will have become an uncontested norm. Maybe. ■
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