Design challenges
BTE-Dan describes himself as a systems and electrical engineer who has spent the past 30 years employed at a Fortune 500 company. He is presently declining interviews.
Though the prospect of a real-life Enterprise is appealing, the proposed ship is not without problems.
Adam Crowl, an engineer with Icarus Interstellar Inc., a nonprofit foundation dedicated to interstellar exploration, pointed out that a spaceship built with a sufficiently powerful nuclear reactor would need large thermal radiators, ruining the classic Enterprise look.
"Engineering physics doesn't respect our aesthetics," he told SPACE.com by email.
BTE-Dan's ship is essentially an iconic replica of the famous starship, and may not be practical.
"I would love to see 1,000 people go to Mars, but I need convincing that they need to be on the Enterprise to do so," said Crowl.
Other engineers said the similarities between BTE-Dan's ship and the Enterprise are only skin-deep.
"He wants to build something using foreseeable technology that just looks like the Enterprise," said Marc Millis, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center. "It's nowhere close to being what the Enterprise is."
Still, the site received so many visits soon after its launch that it crashed, revealing how appealing the idea is to many people.