Stretch goal

What’s interesting about interstellar missions?

"It’s that you can now see bits and pieces of technology that some day, 50 or 100 years from now, that we’re going to need to be doing these type of missions," said Robert Frisbee, senior member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In a de-facto sense, there are those in the engineering community that embrace interstellar travel as a "stretch goal," Frisbee said.

NASA’s Apollo program to land a human on the Moon was such a stretch goal.

"When it was first proposed, it was technically impossible. We didn’t have any way to pull it off. But there were all these bits and pieces of technology being developed, from big rocket engines, fuel cells, to life support systems and heat shields," Frisbee said.

A stretch goal is a very powerful tool, Frisbee said, helping people to focus their efforts, take blinders off, and open up to new possibilities.

Today, no stretch goal exists in the classic Apollo sense, Frisbee added. But there’s an unofficial, engineer-level, stretch goal - the dream of interstellar flight.