DARPA To Sponsor R&D For Interstellar Travel 364
Apocryphos writes "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."
WHERE ARE THE PRIVATE INVESTORS? (Score:2, Interesting)
You need to ask? (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about it. Launches are expensive. Spaceflight is expensive. Nobody has found a pure gold asteroid, and even if they did it would take more money to get any of the gold back to Earth than the gold would be worth. Communications satellites only exist because the phone companies can charge users a fortune in bills over decades.
Private investors don't give a shit about technology, and certainly certainly not for technology that has no possibility of a financial return.
Remember, billionaires got that way because they're damn stingy and only give in order to get more. Wannabe billionaires are even more that way. Where they donate, it is purely for tax reasons. (They can offset all the taxes from income and capital gains and still make a fortune.) It's not for charity and it's certainly not for the benefit of industrialists who could become rich if the technology pays off. This isn't even putting the billionaires down at all. This is simply the logic of economics and it is the logic of economics that create the uber-wealthy in the first place.
The ONLY people who have both the money AND the incentive to do this kind of work is government. That is why the US and USSR have space programs and Argentinia (which had no shortage of private individuals with know-how for sale after the war) does not. If private investors had any motivation to actually do something in space (as opposed to paying an agency to lob yet another radio/tv/bittorrent relay into orbit), it would have already happened. The closest we've seen yet are Virgin Galactic (which doesn't even reach orbit) and some guys launching small rockets from old oil rig platforms (who, incidentally, you don't hear much about these days).
As for half a million - it might sound a lot but it would pay for five mid-grade private sector researchers for a year. Not equipment, computers, space, or anything else, just the salaries of those five people. Public sector workers would be cheaper - you could get easily two or three times as many - but this is funding for a private effort so you're limited to five. This research is going to require pushing what we know about human hibernation to the absolute limits. It is going to require some amazing work on radiation shielding. In order for the people on board to develop normally, it is going to require some fantastic developments in materials science (you will need a vehicle 3/4 of a mile in diameter to be able to develop artificial gravity without inducing motion sickness - and then you will need to figure out how to put that vehicle in orbit).
And, yes, those are mid-grade researchers. Top-end researchers in the private sector would limit you to two or three people, which wouldn't even get you enough to have one specialist per major problem to be solved.
This is another reason the private sector is a Bad Choice for this kind of work. Public sector scientists are much much cheaper and, since they have access to shared regional or national computation resources, don't require as much money to get a project like this off the ground. The private sector is simply not cost-effective for this kind of work.