The Sci-fi movie "Passengers," explores the fascinating and dangers of interplanetary travel, but could the kind of starship showed in the movie ever occur in real life? Onboard on Starship Avalon, which is carrying more than 5,000 passengers to a long-travelled, fit for human habitation planet labeled as Homestead II.
Traveling at half the speed of light (still fast), the crew and passengers are projected to hibernate for 120 years before arriving. That is until somebody unintentionally wakes up 90 years early.
The Ship Avalon Design
The Avalon has three elongated, thin components that wrap around a common center and spin like stripes on a barbershop pole. Dyas said he created that design on sycamore seeds. It appears that the spin also supplies ships with artificial gravity, like fictional ships in "Interstellar" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." Eight nuclear fusion reactors power the ship, Dyas said, and can run freely, healing most structures even with the crew sleeping (as seen in the film).
"My tactic to the design was that I tried to go about it, still I was a cruise liner ship designer," Dyas told Space.com. "I wanted to put my persona in other shoes who had been designing a craft that had a portion of it devoted to entertainment, and of course that led to the range of colors and textual changes in the ship." The style led Dyas to plot more practical areas (like the mess hall) in its stainless steel crafty, while a stylish passenger pub was decorated in rich oranges, golds, and reds, for example.
Hibernation
While "Passengers" shows, people placed in a sleeping state for decades at a time, that kind of technology does not exist as of today, there are states, however, where patients can be put into induced comas with cooled saline recipe for a few days to allow hurtful injuries to heal.
"We're trying to put people in a small bottle to minimize the mass and power ratios, and the consumables," he added, saying that all over along Mars journey of perhaps six months, putting rocketeers into motionlessness would cut down on the amount of food required for the assignment, not to mention the leeway of crew boredom. "That part of the plot is usually soared over," Bradford said.
Interstellar Propulsion
Nuclear fusion is a probable source of thrust for interstellar ships, but the problem is the size of the vessels that would need to bring together in space, or launched there, according to some investors we talked to. So, other methods are being well-thought-out to get spacecraft going at interstellar hustles.
"The antimatter concept engine generates a lot of photons when matter reacts with antimatter," he told Space.com. "All of the matter is overcome and it turns into pure photonic energy. However, the photons themselves are hard to capture."
"As time goes by, if we're going to build these massive habitats, we are going to build something from existing space materials," he said. "That's a very possible idea. There's figuratively millions of asteroids out there from which we could harvest resources without having to drag it out of the gravity of the Earth."
Ship Design
"I'm getting a little tired of non-natural gravity in 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,' he said, referring to the ability of the ships in these to generate gravity by more theoretic means. Experts interviewed for the story agreed that, in general, the ship also look as if to consider human factors, which means designing an ambiance so that it can best adapt how humans operate.
So, could a ship like one from 'Passengers' movie really exist? Our experts appeared to agree that there are some pieces that reflect to in reality science, but some key inquiries remain about how such a gigantic spacecraft would make an interstellar trek adventure.
