Design of a Multi-Generational, Interstellar Ship

If someone were offered a trip to the stars, he or she might be captured by the glamour of the "trip of a lifetime." Yet, unless a new physics dethrones E=mc², it would not only mean the trip of a lifetime, but of several lifetimes. Furthermore, as manned platforms are currently conceived, some future mastery of all pertinent technological, economic and social hurdles would still not produce a starship hospitable to life. Spacecraft are designed first and foremost to meet mission specificiations, with human factors concerns as an appendix. On an interstellar journey, humans are the mission. Therefore, a new approach to large and small-scale design issues must be taken that is dictated first by habitability criteria. An approach might be applied whereby the ship is viewed as a self-contained city, an entire ecosystem in which the ecology is in complete harmony with the human presence. Such systems of city architecture were envisioned by Paolo Soleri and others, and are applied here to derive human-driven design constraints for the meso-level design principles of this spaceship. These specifications then suggest solutions to issues as varied as gravity, shielding, life support systems, food production, clustering and separation of human spaces, and accommodation of crew growth.