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INTERSTELLAR DREAMS JUST GOT A BLUEPRINT

Project Hyperion - an international, interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, anthropologists, and urban planners - launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel. The event was hosted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), a UK-based non-profit organization dedicated to the robotic and human exploration of exoplanets around nearby stars, and eventually settlement. With a prize purse of $10,000, competitors were tasked with producing concepts for a Generation Ship (aka. Worldships) using current technologies and those that could be realized in the near future.

The participating teams were interdisciplinary and required at least one architectural designer, engineer, and social scientist (sociologist, anthropologist, etc.). Each team was tasked with creating ships that featured self-sustaining ecosystems, featuring agriculture, habitation, and other necessary life-support systems to ensure survival across multiple generations. Per the competition rules, these ships needed to provide:

• Habitability for 1,000 ± 500 people over centuries
• Artificial gravity via rotation
• A society that ensures good living conditions, including essential provisions such as shelter, clothing, and other basic needs.
• Robust life support systems for food, water, waste, and the atmosphere
• Knowledge transfer mechanisms to retain culture and technologies

First Place: Chrysalis

The Chrysalis team hails from Italy and included Giacomo Infelise, an architect and landscape designer; Veronica Magli, an economic scientist and innovator; Guido Sbrogio, an astrophysicist and engineer; Nevenka Martinello, an environmental engineer and freelance artist; and Federica Chiara Serpe, a psychologist, actress, and artist.

“Chrysalis impressed the jury with its system-level coherence and innovative design of the modular habitat structure but also overall depth of detail, which included, for example, in-space manufacturing and the value of pre-mission crew preparation in Antarctica. Its modular shell design promotes flexibility and connectivity, supporting both functionality and scalability. The large Dome structure adds a dramatic, cinematic quality that evokes science fiction classics, while the overall system-level planning—covering not just architecture but also how to build the vessel—is notably strong.” -- Project Hyperion Jury

Life on the Chrysalis

• Before boarding the ship, the Chrysalis project would require initial generations of ship inhabitants to live in and adapt to an isolated environment in Antarctica for 70 to 80 years to ensure psychological wellbeing
• The vessel, which would measure 36 miles (58 km) in length, would be constructed like a Russian nesting doll, with several layers encompassing each other around a central core. The layers include communal spaces, farms, gardens, homes, warehouses and other shared facilities, each powered by nuclear fusion reactors.
• The layer closest to Chrysalis' core is dedicated to food production, nurturing plants, fungi, microbes, insects and livestock in controlled environments. To preserve biodiversity, different environments including tropical and boreal forests would be maintained.
• The second level from the center provides communal spaces, like parks, schools, hospitals and libraries, for the ship’s inhabitants. The next shell would then hold dwellings for individual households, equipped with air circulation and heat exchangers.
• Work happens on the next level up, where there are facilities for industries ranging from recycling to pharmaceuticals to structural manufacturing. The fifth and outermost shell would serve as a warehouse for varied types of resources, materials, equipment and machinery. The Chrysalis' designers suggest that robots could run this level, reducing the need for human physical labor.
• Births would be planned in Chrysalis to ensure the population stays at a sustainable level, which the research team determined to be about 1,500 people — 900 people less than the ship's total capacity.
• Those responsible for the ship's governance would collaborate with artificial intelligence, "allowing for resilience of the whole social system, better knowledge transfer between the different generations of inhabitants and a deeper vision of the overall dynamics of the Chrysalis spaceship complex," the project engineers wrote in their pitch.

“This plan is purely hypothetical, as some of the required technology, like commercial nuclear fusion reactors, don't yet exist. However, hypothetical projects like this one can still add to our existing knowledge base and help engineers improve upcoming designs,” the Chrysalis Team states.

Related: The Chrysalis Team Pitch