A study undertaken by the British Interplanetary Society to investigate the feasibility of producing a design for an interstellar spacecraft capable of reaching the nearer stars in periods of a few decades, and using only existing or foreseeable technology. The initial conclusions were that it might be possible to employ a nuclear pulse ROCKET (i.e. a rocket propelled by a series of controlled thermo-nuclear explosions) to achieve an effective EXHAUST VELOCITY of the order of 10000 km per second (thousands of times better than existing rockets).
