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This small town is crowdfunding a full-scale Enterprise space ship

Image Credit: Future Vulcan space research institute/Indiegogo

A small Canadian town called Vulcan has banded together to build the ultimate tribute to popular sci-fi TV franchise Star Trek: a full-sized version of the starship Enterprise.

And the town only needs to hit its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign goal of CA$2 billion (about $1.8 billion) by Oct. 4 to make it happen.

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The campaign’s funding goals start out at just CA$10 ($9), which gets your name included on a “wall of honor” at a yet-to-be-built campus for space travel research.

You have to hand it to the organizers for really hitting sci-fi geeks in the feels with this description:

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Every single individual who contributes to this campaign will effectively be making a contribution to the future of humankind. As such, your name will be included on a permanent monument located on the campus of the future VSLRC which will honour those who have helped bring the far reaches of the universe that much closer.

The next few rewards get a bit pricier: For CA$10,000, you’ll get invited to the debut of an official warp drive engine launch (should that ever happen); CA$500,000 to have something named after you on the warp drive research campus; and finally CA$1 million to have an entire spaceport named after you.

The campaign makes it clear that the entire project’s cost would reach well into the trillions of dollars range and that the initial funding goal is simply to fund research.

Right now only 55 people have contributed to the campaign, so the likelihood of it ever reaching its goal seems slim to none. However, the diehard Trekkie in me expects nothing less from a city named after the home planet of James T. Kirk’s second in command, Spock.


Related: NASA’s new ‘IXS Enterprise’ is a spaceship worthy of James T. Kirk


One thing that doesn’t exactly jive with Trek history is that we still need riots in San Francisco to spark a new age of enlightenment where we move away from a capitalist-based society in favor of helping and educating anyone that needs it. (We’ve gotten as far as the rioting, but Silicon Valley’s venture capitalist community probably isn’t going to budge on abolishing currency any time soon.)

Check out the video from the full-scale Enterprise campaign’s creators embedded below, as well as the campaign page itself for a detailed overview of the project that probably (definitely) isn’t going to happen, sadly.

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