Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
Project Hyperion competition winners dreamed up Chrysalis, a starship and space habitat that could make it to the planet Proxima b in just 400 years (which is ridiculously fast).
The spacecraft is designed to run on a fusion engine, create artificial gravity, and carry about a thousand people while flying at around a tenth of the speed of light.
Though Chrysalis remains a concept (for now), it could end up launching something unprecedented in the future.
Headed towards the Proxima Centauri system, the starship Chrysalis traverses a seemingly endless expanse of space as it soars toward its final destination—the potentially habitable planet Proxima b. There, over a thousand passengers who have been living in the airborne habitat (the descendants of a crew that launched from Earth four centuries ago) will build a new frontier for humanity.
Chrysalis sounds as if it flew straight out of a scene in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. But despite its sci-fi features, this is an actual spacecraft concept that recently won the Project Hyperion design competition hosted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is). The craft is the brainchild of an interdisciplinary team of Italian researchers—Giacomo Infelise, Veronica Magli, Guido Sbrogio, Nevenka Martinello, and Federica Chiara Serpe—who were challenged to come up with a floating habitat that would eventually touch down on the closest exoplanet to Earth, Proxima b.
“The presentation is rich and visually engaging, drawing comparisons to iconic works like Rama, and showcasing a clear passion for both design and storytelling,” the competition jury said of Chrysalis in a recent press release. “Its overall spacecraft design seems to take inspiration from the gigantic world ship concepts of the 1980s.”
Each team that embarked on this conceptual journey needed at least one architectural designer, one engineer, and one social scientist. Their mission was to figure out how to accommodate a thousand (give or take 500) people over the centuries it would take for the spacecraft to reach its destination. Like the fictional starships it was inspired by, Chrysalis would to produce artificial gravity through a rotation system, in order to try and counteract the detrimental effects of microgravity on the human body. Designing support systems for food, water, waste, and an atmosphere—as well as coming up with ways to provide livable conditions and meet basic needs—were also mandatory parts of the contest. Additionally, there would need to be methods of transferring knowledge from generation to generations in order to both keep culture alive and retain (and advance) technology.
The spacecraft would also have to trek through space at a maximum velocity of a tenth of the speed of light, and make it to Proxima b in as close to 250 years as possible. The fastest spacecraft to date is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which recently zoomed past the Sun at a blazing 692,000 kmph (430,000 mph). But even Parker would still be short of one trillion miles (1.6 trillion km) after 224 years of travel, and still have over 24 trillion miles to go.
If Chrysalis ever becomes a reality, it should make it to Proxima b in 400 years, after a year-long acceleration period. It would take another year to decelerate once it reached the planet. Proxima b is 4.24 light-years away, and one light-year equates to about 9.5 trillion km (6 trillion miles). So, the journey from here to Proxima b would cover 39 trillion km (25 trillion miles) through the void. Doing that in 400 years is certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Much like the chrysalis of a moth or butterfly blown to epic proportions, Chrysalis was imagined as a 58,000-meter-long (63,430 yards), 2.4 billion-metric-ton (2.65 US tons) cylindrical structure. Its narrower front end would mitigate the risk of impacts from micrometeoroids, space junk, and anything else that could cause a damaging collision. The minimized front end is also meant to reduce stress on the spacecraft as it accelerates and decelerates. Powered by the nuclear fusion of helium and deuterium isotopes, its propulsion system would be a Direct Fusion Drive (DFD)—an engine that is still very much in the conceptual phase. It is supposed to give the spacecraft a simultaneous burst of electrical power and thrust.
There is a reason that some floating off-earth habitats in science fiction are shown rotating in space. The front end of Chrysalis—which is imagined to function as the habitat—would have multiple levels in flexible modular shells that fit into each other and constantly rotate on one axis to maintain artificial gravity. From outer to inner, levels would be specialized for food production, ecosystems, communal spaces, housing, gardens, facilities, a warehouse, and the axial core. The Cosmo Dome at the front end is intended to be a bubble of microgravity that provides an incredible view to passengers as they experience weightlessness for a while.
So, where do we go from here? Humans have yet to reach Mars (much less Proxima b), and whether such a massive concept can ever translate to reality remains to be seen. However, landing on the Moon was seen as an impossibility only a hundred years ago—the limits of humanity are possibly boundless.
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