Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own. The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile (40 trillion kilometer) journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft.
Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b — an Earth-size exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.
This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don’t yet exist. However, hypothetical projects like this one can still add to our existing knowledge base and help engineers improve upcoming designs.
Their presentation on Canva
they do have a physicist in the design team but how do you plan this without at least a couple engineers?
Well they have a space mission engineer. But the project is not technical, like how to build it, its more like a master plan.
I perhaps don’t quite get what the end game is with such projects but if it critically depends on multiple processes/components which is very hard to achieve (say there has been minimal progress on it until now ex: teleportation) then I feel like it undermines the project. Ofcourse a physicist might help with such stuff when it is science related but there will those that pertain more to engineering.
I think the future technologies that they rely on are mainly the fusion power generation and fusion propulsion. I wouldn’t say that they are far future technologies.