The American defence department's research wing, Darpa, has awarded $500,000 (£319k) to form the 100 Year Starship initiative and help make interstellar travel a reality.
Former Nasa astronaut Mae Jemison, who flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992, will head the new independent organisation that will strive to turn Star Trek from fiction into something resembling fact.
The goal is to bring all sorts of disciplines together, from engineers to philosophers, to design a spacecraft that could set off to carry people to the stars within the next hundred years.
But not many realise, perhaps, that this ambitious project has its roots in a futuristic concept called Project Daedalus that was set up by the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) way back in the 70s.
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