Would you board a spacecraft that takes 400 years to succeed in Alpha Centauri?

Think about leaving Earth eternally and boarding a spaceship designed to hold you and hundreds of others on a one-way journey to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri — a journey that might take 400 years.

That is the daring imaginative and prescient behind Chrysalis, a hypothetical spacecraft that might transport 2,400 individuals over 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers) to the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. The mission gained first place within the Mission Hyperion Design Competitors on July 23, a contest amongst engineers to design a hypothetical multigenerational spacecraft constructed for long-duration interstellar journey and able to sustaining a closed society over centuries.