Project Hyperion

Posted by Tom Piarulli on 01/24/2016

Project Hyperion

Many studies of interstellar craft focus on vessels that are unmanned. This is because the task of starship construction is considered sufficiently challenging without the additional complexity of creating an environment where humans could survive for decades or even centuries. Project Hyperion will tackle this specific challenge head on and perform a preliminary study that defines concepts for a crewed interstellar starship.

Major areas of study include propulsion, environmental control, life support, social studies related to crewed multi-decadal/multi-century missions, habitat studies, communications, psychology of deep spaceflight, mission objectives and ethics of sending humans to the stars. Like with all complex system developments, a major challenge is to merge the results from the domain-specific sub studies into a coherent system design. This shall be accomplished by using up-to-date systems engineering approaches like concurrent engineering and model-based systems engineering

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

A.M. Hein, M. Pak, D. Putz, C. Buhler, P. Reiss, “World Ships – Architectures & Feasibility Revisited“, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 65, 119-133, 2012

C.M. Smith, “Estimation of a genetically viable population for multigenerational interstellar voyaging: Review and data for project Hyperion“, Acta Astronautica, Volume 97, April–May 2014, Pages 16-29.