A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of crewed spacecraft in which most or all of the crew spend the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. The only known technology that allows long-term suspended animation of humans is the freezing of early-stage human embryos through embryo cryopreservation, which is behind the concept of embryo space colonization. The most common role of sleeper ships in fiction is for interstellar or intergalactic travel, usually at sub-light speed. Travel times for such journeys could reach into the hundreds or thousands of years, making some form of life extension, such as suspended animation, necessary for the original crew to live to see their destination. Suspended animation is also required on ships that cannot be used as generation ships. Freezing the astronauts would probably involve whole-body vitrification and would, most likely, be frozen at 145 kelvins to reduce the risk of fracturing. Suspended animation can also be useful to reduce the consumption of life support system resources by crew members who are not needed during the trip, or by an author as a plot device, and for this reason, sleeper ships sometimes also make an appearance in the context of purely interplanetary travel.
Examples in fiction
There are numerous examples of sleeper ships in science fiction literature and films. Some of the best-known examples are:
The interplanetary sleeper ship USSC Discovery One is one of the main subjects of the whole Space Odyssey franchise. As it is told in ', six crew members are on the spacecraft: Commander "Dave" Bowman and Frank Poole were de-hibernated before the others; Victor Kaminsky, Jack Kimball and Charles Hunter were killed by the sixth member: the psychopathicartificial intelligenceHAL 9000.
Pandorum
In the 2016 filmPassengers, the suspended animation system keeping 5,000 passengers in hibernation on board the Avalon fails as a result of asteroid collisions.
The TV seriesLost in Space used a sleeper ship, the Jupiter II, intended to hold the crew for the five-and-a-half-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Dr. Smith, a saboteur and accidental stowaway, is forced to revive the crew to save the ship from meteors.
The film Lost in Space, in which the suspended animation system fails, bringing the crew of Jupiter 2 out of sleep prematurely.
Nostromo, the sleeper/cargo ship in the film Alien.
Sulaco, the sleeper/war ship in the film Aliens.
Planet of the Apes
Avatar
Stargate SG-1. A ship is found with its crew in cryostasis.
Stargate Universe – The crew of the Destiny enter stasis in order to sleep during a potentially millennia long trip.
Prometheus
SS Botany Bay, a sleeper ship from the ' episode "Space Seed", transporting a crew of augments that include Khan Noonien Singh.
Called a "sail-ship" by Cordwainer Smith in Think Blue, Count Two
Cargo
New Mayflower and Ark from Frederik Pohl's novel The World at the End of Time
After Earth
Homeworld
Freelancer – five sleeper ships built by the Alliance: the Bretonia, the Rheinland, the Hispania, the Kusari and the Liberty
The space station-starship hybrid Endurance from Interstellar is used by NASA astronauts to travel through a wormhole to another galaxy in order to find a new planet for humanity or bomb the planet with human embryos.
Event Horizon - the vessel Lewis and Clark is dispatched to find what happened to the ship Event Horizon. Crew is put in hibernation.
In the official trailer of the video game ', a sleeper ship was seen sending humans from Earth to an alien planet.
Hyperion, a novel by Dan Simmons. The Seed Ships are a type of slower than light travel that put the passengers into a fugue-like state for the length of the trip.
