NASA is running a competition to figure out how to settle the galaxy

Ten thousand years from now, humanity decides to settle 100,000 stars in the galaxy, and the race is on to see who can spread through our cosmic neighbourhood the fastest. That’s the premise of the 10th Global Trajectory Optimisation Competition (GTOCX) currently being run by NASA, in which teams of astrophysicists and engineers attempt to plot out a course for the human race to populate the stars.

In this imagined future, humans have access to large spacecraft that can support life long enough to travel to other stars, but…