DARPA and NASA had jointly realized that nobody in their right mind formulated plans and undertook projects on anything like the 100-year time horizon that they thought was needed to design, build, outfit, and launch a crewed interstellar vehicle. So they wanted to seed-fund some private organization to do so, and for an essentially backdoor reason: namely to reap whatever possible spinoff technologies might accrue from such an endeavor. “DARPA also anticipates that the advancements achieved by such technologies will have substantial relevance to Department of Defense (DoD) mission areas including propulsion, energy storage, biology/life support, computing, structures, navigation, and others.”