Moving the World

This dude wants to build a real U.S.S. Enterprise that can make the trip to Mars in 90 days. Yeah, he's a bit of a crackpot, but I agree with his motivations:

If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars putting humans into space, including visiting other celestial bodies like the moon and Mars, it’s time to get past the mentality of one-shot space missions. America is an affluent nation with 27% of the world’s GDP. We can afford to dream much bigger. Doing a one-shot mission to Mars makes no sense given its high cost and that all of the equipment used in the mission will be discarded or put into museums. A one-shot mission to Mars is really just a souped-up version of our first one-shot mission to the moon. Once the Mars feat is done, the party is over, just like it was soon over after we landed on the moon. So after a one-shot Mars mission we will be back to scratching our heads trying to figure out how humans will ever get firmly established in space. As incredible as it would be to see humans walking on the surface of Mars as part of a one-shot mission, we have to wonder if there is a better way to tackle the challenge of human space exploration.

His plan may be goofy, but he's thinking along the correct lines. The problem with space exploration today is that it has been taken over by bureaucrats whose only real long-term goal is to fatten their pensions as much as possible. We need people like Enterprise Boy. No, he probably won't succeed. But somebody will.

It sounds silly that an internet goofball could ever build a skyscraper-sized spaceship powered by ion engines designed for small deep-space probes. Just about as silly as two bicycle mechanics strapping a new-fangled internal-combustion engine to a homemade contraption manufactured from lumber and bicycle parts and flying it across a North Carolina beach.