A team of engineers has come up with designs of a 36-mile spacecraft, dubbed Chrysalis, designed to carry up to 2,400 passengers to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own.
As first spotted by Live Science, the ambitious vision recently won the team the top prize at the Project Hyperion Design Competition, which was launched last year by an international consortium of scientists, engineers, and urban planners.
Unsurprisingly, Chrysalis sounds like it was yanked straight out of a sci-fi novel. The hypothetical habitat generates Earth-like gravity by constantly rotating around its own axis, as laid out in a project brief. Several onion-like layers include dwellings and gardens for inhabitants, warehouses, food production and ecosystems, and communal spaces.
Each of these shells is powered by nuclear fusion reactors — which, it's fair to point out, is tech that hasn't been yet been made practical by anybody here on Earth.
Chrysalis is made up of several stages, each of which is a "fully autonomous and complete" habitat.
The layer closest to the core was designed to provide space for plants, microbes, livestock, and other mechanisms of food production. Various environments allow biodiversity to continue, including tropical and boreal forests.
The second layer houses communal spaces, and the third holds "3D-printed dwelling modules." The outermost shell serves as a warehouse for machinery, equipment, and other types of resources.
A "Cosmos Dome," 426 feet in height and 1,180 feet in diameter, provides a controlled, zero-gravity environment, as well as thermal insulation and shielding from deep space radiation.
It's also the only place where inhabitants can gaze at the universe outside, while freely and safely floating around in weightlessness.
"Through the transparent panels of the dome, the inhabitants will be able to observe the universe to the rear of the spaceship," the brief reads.
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