All eight of America's Enterprises have been warships, from the first square-rigger, to the celebrated World War II Aircraft Carrier (CV-6), to its nuclear-powered namesake (CVA-65). There have also been several fictional Enterprise starships, also men-of-war, but with the primary mission of exploring the cosmos. I propose a new Enterprise, to honor this venerable name and this latter, peaceful mission. This ultimate Enterprise will be ship of peace, of exploration, and it will be unmanned. It, and its sister ships, will have the tasks of discovery, exploration, and survey of the extrasolar environment.

The Enterprise Project, hereby initiated on these boards for your inspection and comment, is how I see the human race exploring the Galaxy for the next thousand years. It is a framework for my most optimistic hopes for our future as a species. I see it as a future Universe, like the Star Trek Universe, or the Star Wars Universe, where we can construct fictional scenarios in an attempt to anticipate the challenges of this new domain. It is based on what we know currently about physics and astronomy, and what can be reasonably extrapolated from our current engineering and technology. No doubt, we will learn much in the future that is inconceivable today, but let us discipline ourselves to what we know now and can reasonably predict with some confidence. Anything else would be just guesswork.

The Enterprise Project will begin before our current exploration of the solar system is complete. It will also depend on our utilization of solar system resources developed on colonies on its worlds and satellites, the asteroid belt and in orbits around these bodies. Although the exploration and industrial exploitation of the solar system will occupy much of our energy for the next few centuries, I believe it to be an essentially self-limiting environment. Let's face it, the little heaps of blasted slag and frigid ice circling Sol are not where Mankind's destiny lies, it is in the stars. If Earth is our cradle, then the worlds orbiting Sol are only our back yard. The Enterprise Project will cover the transition of humanity from an interplanetary civilization to an interstellar one. It will begin with our first unmanned probe to a nearby star, and end with our first manned expeditions to the outer darkness.

The idea of the Enterprise Project is to try and crystallize some of my thoughts on interstellar travel, and to solicit input from others who may wish to criticize or add to my ideas. Please feel free to contribute to this effort, and see it as a way of constructing an outline for a possible future that we can explore together, either in fiction or in discussion (maybe even debate!)and which can serve as a resource for fiction writers and essayists. I have deliberately picked a time period intermediate between the immediate future (the exploration and settlement of our own system) and the far future (the spread of Homo Sapiens across the Galaxy). This should give us enough distance to allow our imaginations free rein, and yet not throw us into the distant realms of pure speculation.

Or if you prefer, perhaps the Enterprise Project can be seen as a new literary form, a group essay with multiple authors, a form of collective fiction with many, often conflicting, points of view. If it is successful, perhaps the moderators can move this thread (wih a little editing!) into its own forum, where it can be our own portal into the first millennium of interstellar flight.

And let us posit one other purpose for this genre. If we ever become a true spacefaring species, then the odds are we are not the only one. The Enterprise Project may give us some fictional insight into those we share the Galaxy with, and which we will inevitably encounter. One of the purposes of science fiction, speculative fiction, is to allow us to have some experience with the unexpected, so if we ever do confront it, we are not totally unprepared.

I look forward to your contributions and comments.