For a long time I have been fascinated by the idea that a spacecraft does not have to be a machine. It can be an organism.
I remember StarCraft and Dark Colony, computer games that enriched my youth and trained my imagination. I am grateful to the people who made them. Whatever creative thinking I have grew partly in the worlds they built, and I have not forgotten whom to thank.
The city of Jason is such an organism: a living research vessel traveling through the Solar System. I like to imagine its corridors rising and falling slowly, like the breathing of something asleep. Its mission is to make contact with life beneath the ice of Pluto.
That life resembles nothing we know. It does not breathe oxygen. It knows no time in the human sense. And yet it may be intelligent.
Sometimes I think the hardest thing to build for a journey like this is an open mind. Technology can be engineered. The readiness of a human mind for whatever it meets on the road to the last frontier has to be earned.