This Starship Could Take Humanity to a New Home – Popular Mechanics

If this space habitat ever becomes a reality, it could take us all the way to exoplanet Proxima b.

By Elizabeth Rayne, Published: Aug 06, 2025 2:30 PM EDT

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Project Hyperion competition winners dreamed up Chrysalis, a starship and space habitat that could make it to the planet Proxima b in just 400 years (which is ridiculously fast).
• The spacecraft is designed to run on a fusion engine, create artificial gravity, and carry about a thousand people while flying at around a tenth of the speed of light.
• Though Chrysalis remains a concept (for now), it could end up launching something unprecedented in the future.

Headed towards the Proxima Centauri system, the starship Chrysalis traverses a seemingly endless expanse of space as it soars toward its final destination—the potentially habitable planet Proxima b. There, over a thousand passengers who have been living in the airborne habitat (the descendants of a crew that launched from Earth four centuries ago) will build a new frontier for humanity.

Chrysalis sounds as if it flew straight out of a scene in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. But despite its sci-fi features, this is an actual spacecraft concept that recently won the Project Hyperion design competition hosted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is). The craft is the brainchild of an interdisciplinary team of Italian researchers—Giacomo Infelise, Veronica Magli, Guido Sbrogio, Nevenka Martinello, and Federica Chiara Serpe—who were challenged to come up with a floating habitat that would eventually touch down on the closest exoplanet to Earth, Proxima b.

“The presentation is rich and visually engaging, drawing comparisons to iconic works like Rama, and showcasing a clear passion for both design and storytelling,” the competition jury said of Chrysalis in a recent press release. “Its overall spacecraft design seems to take inspiration from the gigantic world ship concepts of the 1980s.”

Each team that embarked on this conceptual journey needed at least one architectural designer, one engineer, and one social scientist. Their mission was to figure out how to accommodate a thousand (give or take 500) people over the centuries it would take for the spacecraft to reach its destination. Like the fictional starships it was inspired by, Chrysalis would to produce artificial gravity through a rotation system, in order to try and counteract the detrimental effects of microgravity on the human body. Designing support systems for food, water, waste, and an atmosphere—as well as coming up with ways to provide livable conditions and meet basic needs—were also mandatory parts of the contest. Additionally, there would need to be methods of transferring knowledge from generation to generations in order to both keep culture alive and retain (and advance) technology.

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