Building The Interstellar Spaceship A giant telescope been built more than a century ago, has a thin-film metal mirror of 5 km (about 3 miles) diameter. The mirror was maintained in proper optical-focusing shape with the help of electromagnetic fields. It had the ability to resolve Moon-size planet objects that orbit around stars as far as 200 light years away. It was in disuse for 35 years after a major failure of its main image sensor that lies at the focal point of that mirror. It was orbiting the Sun at the trailing Lagrangian point of the Jupiter planet, before being towed back to a high orbit plane around the Earth, for possible repair or replacement of the old focal point instrument module, and for refurbishing its aging giant mirror. After a 2-month inspection and the publication of the observations, a spaceship engineer proposed an audacious plan for transforming this telescope into an interstellar spaceship. It took a year for other engineers to accept the idea; already there was a plan to build a colonization-size interstellar spaceship but it would have taken more than a century to build it; that engineer made it possible to build such spaceship in only 40 years. This picture shows an early transformation stage of the giant telescope into a one-way interstellar spaceship. The Hypercargo-class spaceships (shown at the forefront) are the main vehicle for carrying the building modules toward that giant construction site at its orbital position around Earth. In that story, Ionivka would have been born 10 years after that interstellar spaceship, not yet occupied, had left Earth. It will start to be occupied 25 years later, when the interstellar spaceship would have reached the minimum speed for collecting enough space hydrogen to become energetically self-sufficient (A. Bussard ramjet requirement) and when it would have already reached the Neptune orbit distance. The colonial population would be transported as passengers of the Stingray-class spaceships, from Earth surface to that already distant interstellar spaceship. Note: I do not remember why there are so many horizontal white lines on this picture; I think that was related to the scanner software glitch of that time. Tools Pen. Pencil, Paper Scanner CorelDraw, CorelPaint