DARPA Wants To Head for the Stars

The two flights of its Falcon HTV-2 hypersonic test vehicle may not have turned out as planned, but that isn’t stopping the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from working on plans to travel to another star.

Writing in the New York Times today, Dennis Overbye recaps DARPA’s 100-year Starship Study through which DARPA will award $500,000 in seed money to an organization to study what it would take “organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically” to send people on an interstellar voyage. NASA’s Ames Research Center is partnering with DARPA on the project. David Neyland, director of technical technology at DARPA, is quoted as saying that the agency is not trying to design an interstellar craft itself, but instead wants to find an organization that will carry the concept forward for the next 100 years with private sector, not government, funding.

The idea is that new technologies would be developed over the decades as the effort unfolds that will be useful to the Department of Defense and NASA. DARPA’s announcement of the project last year said that the study “looks to develop the business case for an enduring organization designed to incentivize breakthroughs enabling future spaceflight.”

A three-day symposium will be held in Orlando, FL September 30-October 2 to discuss the responses to DARPA’s request for information. The meeting is free and open to the public.