Take a tour of Chrysalis, a massive, cylindrical spacecraft designed for the Project Hyperion Design Competition.

What would it take to make interstellar travel possible? That’s the basic question behind the Project Hyperion Design Competition, a contest announced in 2024 that asked teams of architects, engineers, and social scientists to design a conceptual spaceship for a crewed trip into interstellar space.

The designs, submitted and judged in 2025, were diverse. Some took the shape of a wheel, while others looked like spinning tops and yo-yos. One was even made to mimic a jellyfish. But the winner was simple, at least from the outside: Chrysalis, a massive, cylindrical spacecraft, was conceptualized to contain everything from food production spaces to living spaces, to communal spaces like parks, schools, and libraries.

“The most difficult, but also interesting and stimulating part, was thinking about how the humans aboard the starship would live and conceive their existence over multiple generations,” the Chrysalis team said in a statement on the competition website. “Chrysalis is not only a physical environment but also a cognitive space for the inhabitants: The phenomenological aspect of living and dwelling in the deep space [...] is central in the design of the spaceship.”

Multigenerational Travel in Deep Space

Intended to investigate the possibility of travel to a habitable exoplanet outside our own solar system, the competition concentrated on generation ships — spaceships created for trips spanning several centuries.

Basically, the teams were told to design ships on which the initial crew would live and die, bearing a line of descendants who would continue to occupy the ship until it arrived at its destination.

Various internal views of the habitat (Chrysalis). (Image Credit: Chrysalis. Giacomo Infelise, Veronica Magli, Guido Sbrogio’, Nevenka Martinello, and Federica Chiara Serpe)

The submissions were designed to be self-sustaining, featuring systems for food, water, waste, and other essentials to ensure the passengers’ survival over time. Judged by a panel of four university professors and one NASA scientist, the teams were also encouraged to ensure comfortable conditions on their imaginary ships, which would allow passengers to thrive.

The Chrysalis design, which was made to accommodate as many as 2,400 passengers for the 400-year trip to Alpha Centauri, the closest solar system to our own, achieved all of that and more. The judges commended the design for its particular attention to the passengers’ psychological needs.

“The challenges of a confined multigenerational journey in the deep space can be psychologically very intensive,” the team said in their statement. “The central core of our design regards the sense of belonging and the motivation of the interstellar mission: After a journey of hundreds of years, what will it be like to arrive in a new solar system and adapt to a new exoplanet?”

Interstellar Space Travel

At around 36 miles long and 2.4 billion tons, the Chrysalis spacecraft would contain a handful of components, including a propulsion system, a propellant module, and a habitation module. Like the overall structure of the spacecraft, the habitation module would be cylindrical, containing five concentric cylindrical tubes, or “shells,” around a single cylindrical core.

According to the team, the outer shell would focus on food production and biological conservation, including fields for crops and other environments — like tropical and boreal forests — to preserve lifeforms found on Earth. Meanwhile, the next two shells would center on communal and living spaces, and the next two shells would concentrate on facilities and storage spaces, which would contain all the material and machinery necessary to sustain a society, as well as the equipment for essential industries, like manufacturing and maintenance.

While completely conceptual, the Chrysalis design — and the design competition as a whole — could serve as a starting off point for future research into interstellar travel.

“We started with specific mission requirements and constraints, taking into account that Chrysalis had to be a truly feasible and functional space mission,” the team said in their statement. “We hope that Chrysalis can be seen as a research baseline for further studies and design explorations.”