By Tariq Malik 

Humans will begin a voyage to the nearest star this century, a NASA researcher says. And the crew might more resemble a tribal society than the chain of command of traditional space missions. Procreation ... would be required: The crew that arrived would be descendents of those that left. Geoffery A. Landis, of NASA's Glenn Research Center, predicts the first star trek aboard a laser-powered sail ship could begin within 50 years as new methods of space travel put interstellar flight within the grasp of our grandchildren. "I think that ultimately we re going to do it, it s just a question of when and who," Landis told SPACE.com . "Interstellar travel, actually colonizing space and terraforming a planet, this is the exploration that everybody seems to want to do." Traditional means of space travel are too slow to push humans out of the solar system. Instead, Landis envisions ships with vast sails, propelled by laser light to about 10 percent the speed of light. Such a craft could make the 4.   [More...] [Less...]