Five engineers just won $5,000 for designing a 36-mile spacecraft that could carry 2,400 people on a 400-year journey.
What’s happening: Five engineers have won the Project Hyperion Design Competition with Chrysalis, a 36-mile spacecraft designed to transport 2,400 people on a 400-year journey to Alpha Centauri, complete with tropical forests, manufacturing facilities, and artificial gravity systems.
Why this matters: This winning design represents breakthrough thinking in multigenerational space travel, addressing complex challenges of sustaining human civilisation during centuries-long interstellar journeys while maintaining psychological wellbeing and social cohesion.
Engineers have designed a spacecraft that could take up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to our own, according to Live Science.
The craft, called Chrysalis, could make the 25 trillion mile journey in around 400 years, the engineers say in their project brief, meaning many of its potential passengers would only know life on the craft.
Chrysalis is designed to house several generations of people until it enters the star system, where it could shuttle them to the surface of the planet Proxima Centuri b, an Earth-sized exoplanet that is thought to be potentially habitable.
The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a challenge that requires teams to design hypothetical multigenerational ships for interstellar travel. The winning team of Giacomo Infelise, Veronica Magli, Guido Sbrogio’, Nevenka Martinello and Federica Chiara Serpe earned $5,000 USD for their innovative approach.
Living city in space
The 36-mile vessel addresses one of space exploration’s greatest challenges: how to sustain human life and society across multiple generations during interstellar travel.
Chrysalis employs a Russian nesting doll design, with multiple layers encompassing each other around a central core. Each layer serves specific functions, from food production to manufacturing, all supported by artificial gravity generated through constant rotation.
The central core houses shuttles for eventual planetary exploration of Proxima Centuri b, an Earth-sized exoplanet in the Alpha Centauri system that scientists believe may be potentially habitable.
Sustainable ecosystems
The innermost layer focuses entirely on food production, nurturing plants, fungi, microbes, insects and livestock in controlled environments. To preserve biodiversity during the 400-year journey, different ecosystems including tropical and boreal forests would be maintained within the spacecraft.
The second level provides communal infrastructure: parks, schools, hospitals and libraries—creating the social fabric necessary for a thriving community. Individual households occupy the third shell, complete with air circulation and heat exchange systems.
Manufacturing and industrial activities happen on the fourth level, encompassing everything from recycling to pharmaceuticals to structural manufacturing. The outermost shell serves as a massive warehouse for resources, materials, equipment and machinery, potentially operated by robots to reduce human physical labour requirements.
Population and governance
The design team calculated an optimal population of approximately 1,500 people, 900 fewer than the spacecraft’s maximum capacity of 2,400. This buffer allows for sustainable population management across multiple generations.
Births would be carefully planned to maintain population stability, while governance would integrate artificial intelligence systems. The AI collaboration aims to ensure “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,” according to the engineers’ project brief.
Psychological preparation
Recognising the psychological challenges of multigenerational space travel, the Chrysalis project includes a unique preparation phase. Initial ship inhabitants would spend 70 to 80 years living in an isolated Antarctic environment before departure, ensuring psychological adaptation to confined community living.
This preparation phase acknowledges that many passengers would live their entire lives aboard Chrysalis, knowing only the spacecraft environment until arrival at Alpha Centauri.
Innovation challenges
The project remains hypothetical, as essential technologies like commercial nuclear fusion reactors don’t yet exist. However, the design demonstrates how theoretical engineering projects contribute to knowledge development and improve future spacecraft designs.
The approach aligns with growing innovation in deep tech sectors, where Australian companies are achieving significant funding milestones for breakthrough research applications across health, energy and sustainability.
The Project Hyperion jury praised Chrysalis for its “system-level coherence and innovative design of the modular habitat structure” and “overall depth of detail,” highlighting the comprehensive approach to solving interstellar travel challenges.
Future implications
While Chrysalis exists only in design, such projects advance understanding of long-term space habitation, sustainable ecosystem management, and multigenerational community planning.
The winning design demonstrates how engineering innovation can address humanity’s biggest challenges, even those centuries in the future. By solving for 400-year sustainability, the Chrysalis team has created frameworks applicable to shorter-term space missions and Earth-based sustainability challenges.
The 25 trillion mile journey to Alpha Centauri remains theoretical, but the thinking behind Chrysalis brings interstellar human travel closer to reality, one innovative design at a time.
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