Trekkie plans crowd-sourced 20 year USS Enterprise building project
We’ve seen many a fan project come and go in our time as netizens, but nothing quite as ambitious, nor as bonkers, as one man’s plan to have a full size working Star Trek USS Enterprise spaceship built.
A fan calling himself “BTE Dan” has founded buildtheenterprise.org, hoping to encourage funding into building a to-scale, fully operational version of the iconic science fiction craft.
Tired of seeing the US’s space program diminish, BTE Dan believes that getting a craft as iconic as the Enterprise built would inspire a whole new wave of space exploration enthusiasts and, hopefully, government funding.
We reckon the Millennium Falcon would be a better bet (sorry Trekkies!), but according to Dan the project would need only “the US dedicate .27% of its GDP each year to the NASA Enterprise program.” He’s even made some suggestions as to which US departments can afford a spending cut to accommodate his plan.
As BTE Dan points out, it’s not like we haven’t planned bigger things in the past, highlighting the Buri Khalifa tower in Dubai:
Dan even reckon’s he has figured out how to get the giant craft off the ground, using a “gravity wheel”. The “magnetically suspended wheel rotates inside a sealed donut-shaped cavity that is formed along the interior perimeter of the saucer hull. The wheel touches no other parts of the ship as it continuously rotates at a constant rate.” Naturally, it’d need electrically-powered ion drives that use on-board nuclear reactors to supply power. We’ve all got one of them lying around.
Admitting to having little technical experience, BTE Dan has called out to the wider community to help him achieve his goal: “If you are a professional mechanical engineer, with experience doing 3D component design including fully simulating them for stress analysis, feel free to contact me if you are interested in discussing this further.”
Gotta love his ambition! “Make it so”, as if we ever really needed any excuse to post this up:
