[hoosierham]

The pschological effects of such a trip preclude normal people,and just how do you know which type would complete the mission?Plus there could be physical health problems.Any human-crewed ship would need to be very large;the whole generational ship concept has been the subject of many a writer.Some were more plausible than others.Keep in mind the size of crews and iron discipline required in the old sailing ship exploration days,even though they were at sea months at worst.Some voyages lasted years but landfall and resupply ,even if only fresh water,meat,and fruit, occurred during those long voyages.

Too bad about TAU,never heard of itIF only we would send a Hubble clone or similar "up" and one more "down" we might get a huge amount of positional data.But better save the money to give bonuses to government slugs and Wall Street money-mismanagers .

Look at our society: it is considered normal for a kid to spend hundreds of dollars and hours avidly playing some video game extolling car theft and street violence but spending a similar amount of effort in amateur astronomy,amateur radio,woodworking, or something productive is seen as "odd"!!!!

[null and void]

IF only we would send a Hubble clone or similar "up" and one more "down" we might get a huge amount of positional data.

Precisely. One up, one down. Twice the baseline in half the time, and still useful data if one fails.

[BenKenobi]

What we would learn from the attempt would be staggering. Personally, I think it’s too early, but then the other half of me says to hell with it, let’s go, fail spectacularly and then get up and try again.

Heaven knows that’s what happened with Apollo. But, the will for this isn’t there and hasn’t been for some time. And it doesn’t look like my generation will either, which is something I learned when the coolest space exploration ever was basically ignored while it was happening. Voyager to Neptune was really cool. Odd that this memory would surface again.

You don’t need multigenerational, but if you are putting that much into it, you might as well design it to be a self-perpetuating mission. But the reality is that the first one is likely to be a hopeless failure and doom everyone on it to a quiet death floating around the universe forever.

But you’d need the one shot unmanned probe to AC. Plus the slingshot to make it economically feasible. Which probably means it’s not happening until we’ve got moonbases.

They’d have to be very, very, lucky if people were the thing to break first. People are generally the last thing to go. How many people errors resulted in the loss of a mission while in space? Zero.