Imagine this: If there’s an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri or another nearby star system, astronomers will know about it within a decade or two — certainly long before we can build a ship like the Enterprise.
Maybe we could consider flying under the speed of light.
It is not widely known, but the US government spent real money, tested hardware and employed some of the best minds in late 1950s and early 60s to develop an idea called nuclear pulse propulsion.
Known as Project Orion, the work was classified because the principle was that your engine shoots a series of “nuclear pulse units” — atomic bombs of roughly Hiroshima/Nagasaki power — out the back. Each unit explodes and the shockwave delivers concussive force to an immense, steel pusher plate.
The other strategy is magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), and similar to [inertial confinement fusion, or] ICF, designs exist for adapting MCF to space propulsion. Like Orion, a Daedalus craft would have to be rather large. But using deuterium and helium-3 (obtained from the lunar surface, or from Jupiter’s atmosphere) as fuel, Daedalus craft could reach 0.12 c, cutting travel time to Alpha Centauri to something like 40 years.
