The prospect of human travel to the stars faces such an exceptionally wide and diverse assortment of obstacles, improbabilities, multiple risks, and inestimable costs, as to make any attempt to traverse the final frontier far more likely to end in tragedy than to succeed in getting human beings safely lodged on the surface of an extrasolar planet that is in all respects suitable for continued and sustained human life. There are, in general, seven separate categories of problems facing starflight: physical, biological, psychological, social, financial, ethical, and motivational. Starting with the physics of the enterprise, we have seen that none of the three icons of star travel embodies a realistic, practical, proven design that would be likely to work as advertised. Not the nuclear-powered Bernal sphere, nor the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet, nor the Project Daedalus rocket, which in any case was not even intended to carry passengers. Project Orion represented the high-watermark of deep space craziness, as many project members themselves realized afterward. As Freeman Dyson acknowledged much later, “We really were a bit insane, thinking that all these things would work.”