Byany standard, Project Icarus is a very ambitious attempt at assessing the requirements for an unmanned interstellar probe using current and developing technology. In the process of producing technical reports on the physics, functionality, engineering and performance requirements of the spacecraft needed for different types of mission profiles, it’s hoped to provide inspiration for a new generation of scientists and boost the possibility of bringing such a scheme into reality. The project is an update of the British Interplanetary Society’s Project Daedalus, which ran from 1973 to 1978. Daedalus envisaged a huge two-stage, 54-million-kilogram nuclearfusion-powered spacecraft fuelled by deuterium and helium-3.
The intentions of Project Icarus are to design a similar unmanned fusion-powered space probe that can be targeted at a variety of nearby star systems and can reach and scientifically study them within a span of 100 years. The goal is to initiate the launch of such a vehicle by 2100 at the least. The vast scale of this project is underlined by the fact that the helium-3 fuel to power the Daedalus craft can only be gathered in the atmosphere of Jupiter. It would take 20 years for robot factories, held afloat by huge balloons, to mine and process the fuel into coin-sized pellets.