Project Daedalus

Project Daedalus was a design study carried out between 1973 and 1978 by the British Interplanetary Society, aimed at showing that an uncrewed interstellar probe was plausible with existing or near-future technology. The spacecraft had to be able to reach its destination within a human lifetime, so the team led by Alan Bond proposed a fusion rocket to carry the probe to Barnard's Star, about 5.9 light years away, on a trip estimated at 50 years. The design was also required to be flexible enough to be sent to any other target star. The probe was never built or launched; it remains a paper design, and the full set of study papers was published by the society in a book on the engineering feasibility of interstellar travel.