'100-Year Starship' on the Drawing Boards at NASA

(Nov. 1) -- A NASA official's brief mention of a spaceship that could could travel to the stars has set off a flurry of speculation over the space agency's plans.

"We just started a project with [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]," Simon "Pete" Worden, the head of the NASA Ames Research Center, said last month at an event sponsored by the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. "It's called the 100-year starship."

This is no round-trip flight to the moon, or even Mars. The astronauts wouldn't come back. The goal of this starship would be a one-way flight for humans to colonize other planets.

"The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds," Worden said.

The project is getting about $1 million in seed funding from DARPA, the far-out research and development arm of the Pentagon. That's not a lot of money by Pentagon standards, but DARPA's support has sparked even more interest in the mysterious project.

Worden said he's also interested in getting the private sector, such as Google, involved to help support the project.

But what exactly the project entails, or what role the private sector may have, is unclear, even for those experts who have long worked in and around NASA. "When I worked for NASA, I was not allowed to suggest that the public, in any way, support or provide money for a particular thing," Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, told AOL News.

Millis now works for the Tau Zero Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to interstellar space travel.

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Since Worden's initial comments, DARPA has not supplied any further details on the project. A call by AOL News to NASA Ames public affairs office was not returned.

But today, DARPA issued a statement confirming its involvement in the project.

"The 100-Year Starship study is about more than building a spacecraft or any one specific technology," Paul Eremenko, a DARPA official coordinating the study, said in a statement released by the agency "We endeavor to excite several generations to commit to the research and development of breakthrough technologies and cross-cutting innovations ... to advance the goal of long-distance space travel, but also to benefit mankind."

A DARPA spokesperson told AOL News that no further information is being released at this time about the study.