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THINK big, think very very big. That’s what Norman Nixon is doing. In fact, his dream is nothing less than awe-inspiring. If all goes to plan, in about two years time he and his Florida-based company will create their very own small town-complete with apartment blocks, shops, schools, hospital and 80 000 inhabitants. But there’s a difference. Nixon’s readymade city will sail across the world on an ocean-going barge.

More than 1 kilometre long and 25 storeys high, this incredible hulk-dubbed Freedom Ship-will pause off the coast of major cities just long enough for Freedom’s residents to get a flavour of the place, before moving on to the next one. All the while, aeroplanes will thump down onto its twin runways, bringing some 10 000 visitors daily to what will surely become a theme park cum eighth wonder of the world.

Astern, a flotilla of lighters will bustle to and fro from local ports, struggling to keep the “mother ship” stocked with fancy foods and tax-free luxury goods. This floating city will have its own business community, a 2000-strong security force, a 600-bed hospital, kindergartens, schools and a university, a world-class shopping mall, even a marina hanging off the back. And at the weekend, the occupants will be able to relax by taking a stroll through 200 acres of glorious park land.

Who would want to live in such a city? Utopian dreamers looking for the chance to invent the ideal society have always felt drawn to the artificial community. In the 1970s, space travel was the obvious option. But while the Internet is still awash with people earnestly drawing up mining charters for their proposed asteroid settlements or raising funds for space hotels, many others have since turned to floating cities as an easier option.

No need to worry about oxygen supplies or rocket drives. Simply build a hulk large enough to transport a self-sustaining community. And now that you can work from anywhere-preferably a place with minimal taxes-the Freedom Ship could make good economic sense. For the right kind of person, an office that sails the globe suddenly becomes a serious proposition. An alternative lifestyle with all the comforts of home.

Bizarre as it sounds the project is well under way. Millions of dollars have already been invested by Nixon’s design company, Engineering Solutions. Even with a final price tag estimated at £4 billion, he’s confident. “When we started a few years ago, I gave it a one-in-ten chance. But it’s definitely going to happen now,” he says. “The interest is such we could sell out three ships.”

Nixon, an engineer whose previous projects have included office blocks and chemicals plants, claims that 3000 people have already signed up for apartments. And just before Christmas, agreement was reached with the Honduran government to build the ship at the port of Trujillo. A ground-breaking ceremony will take place in a few months and a couple of years after that, Nixon and his family intend to be among the first residents setting sail.

But clearly there are many problems to be ironed out first. Prospective residents have already been gathering on the Internet to discuss the likely pros and cons of the venture. Looming large in their minds are the social engineering aspects, the possible irritations of life on board, and safety.

The great attraction of the Freedom Ship is the promise of a completely new life “at sea”, working, getting married, even raising families. But how do you engineer the right mix of ages and trades aboard to create a true community? The age mix will certainly be hard to control. Nixon himself has two young daughters and is expecting at least several hundred other kids to fill each school year, so they should not be lonely. But no one yet knows if the eventual demographic spread will be healthy.

Getting the right skills aboard may also be a problem. Nixon stresses that it will be a working ship. Six decks will be dedicated to shops and businesses. But Nixon says even he has been surprised by the number of people keen to work their passage: “We thought we would get a lot of retired people. But out of the 3000 who have signed up, only about 3 said they won’t be doing something.”

With 80 000 on board-65 000 residents and 15 000 crew-many expect to find jobs catering for the needs of their neighbours. The ship’s management will employ the staff needed to run the basic ship services but other residents will have to bring their careers with them. So what if the ship ends up with too many lawyers and hairdressers, but not enough personal trainers or accountants to go round?

Nixon’s answer is blunt: “These things are a matter of supply and demand. I’m not getting involved, I’m just building the structure. It can be left to the free market to make sure there are enough teachers or nurses or whatever.”

While the rich enjoy their three-bathroom penthouses at £4 million apiece, those in lowly paid trades will have to bunk up in the windowless “econo-cabins” that cost £100 000 plus maintenance fees. But cramped conditions certainly do not seem to deter people working on regular ships, Nixon says. He believes he can count on people’s entrepreneurial spirit to sort things out.

Yet Nixon’s message is quite different when it comes to creating other aspects of his society such as law and order. He says the legal situation will be exactly the same as on any cruise ship. The ship will fly under the flag of one so far unnamed country and abide by its laws. The captain will rule on minor indiscretions and serious crimes will be tried in a person’s home port. To back up the captain’s authority, Nixon is promising a 2000-strong security force and video surveillance of public areas. He certainly does not envisage a free market mentality stretching to drugs, pornography and prostitution-Freedom is for those who are intent on escaping the sleaze of city life, Nixon says.

Ship life will be controlled in more mundane ways. Nixon has said he will fix prices on essentials such as electricity, water and perhaps even staple foods like bread so that residents are not ripped off. And, he says, schoolchildren will be allowed to learn at their own pace, moving up a year as soon as they are ready.

Not all would-be buyers have welcomed such pronouncements and say the community will have to evolve its own rules and governing mechanisms.

There is probably still time to iron out such social engineering issues because the ship will take a few years to build even after it gets the final go-ahead. But what happens if the minor irritations of life on board escalate into major ones? When science fiction writers describe their galactic mother ships, they tend to ignore little things like noise, smells and prohibitions against keeping pets. Yet once the novelty of having the world sweeping past your front door wears off, such petty inconveniences could loom large.

The most obvious drawback will be a lack of light, space and privacy. Even those paying big bucks for a unit with an outside view only get a skinny 5 metre by 25 metre tunnel for their money. Once it is divided up for bathrooms, kitchen and bedrooms, there will be little natural light and what windows there are will generally open onto public walkways.

John McNeece, a cruise ship designer responsible for many ambitious projects including the ResidenSea, a smaller floating home already under construction (see “It’s a wonderful life”), says most of its cabins have no natural light because Freedom is so wide. And the design is too boxy-the product of an engineering vision rather than an architectural one. “In the cruise ship industry, they wouldn’t change the sauce on a salad without a focus group to discuss it,” says McNeece. “A project like this is so novel that you would have to bring in experts in town planning and social engineering to get the details right.”

Jack Stuster, a Californian consultant on space dwellings agrees. He feels that the Freedom Ship may even be starting out too big. Stuster says space colony designers tend to think that the old frontier towns make a good social model. They grew organically from just a few hundred people, building an economic and community structure along the way. “Taking a ship to sea with 80 000 people who probably have little in common, have no understanding of the physical and psychological dangers involved, and have not been screened or selected, is asking for trouble,” says Stuster.

Kim Stanley Robinson, the best-selling science fiction writer whose novel, Blue Mars, featured self-sufficient townships sailing the Martian oceans, applauds the Freedom Ship vision and sees it as a possible step towards designing real space communities. But he thinks Nixon’s notion of rule by the captain wouldn’t last long: “It would quickly become apparent with a population of that size that a town-sized government would be required.”

Even Freedom Ship’s enthusiasts, prospective residents like Julie Webb and Mike Doty who have already booked their units, admit to being a little nervous. New concerns seem to blow up all the time-the latest being the realisation that the planned segregation of shopping and living decks might mean a lot of stair climbing “just to get an ice-cream”.

Doty, an engineer who confesses to a lifetime’s fascination with space colonisation, says the boat is unlikely to be any more cramped, noisy or badly planned than where he lives in San Francisco. The benefits of circling the globe with many like-minded people should far outweigh any petty gripes. Webb, who has signed up for an indoor unit on the Freedom Ship with her husband, says people are just conditioned to expect big windows and lots of space: “You’re going to be travelling the world, a new town every week. If you’re coming on the ship, you’re going to have to change your lifestyle anyway.”

Impossible landing

But what if the Freedom Ship has conceptual flaws that are too big to be fixed? McNeece names the runways on the roof. “When I saw that, I thought there’s not a hope in hell. You can’t even talk seriously about it,” says McNeece.

McNeece says he can’t see any air authority or insurer letting civilians land their planes on a boat, let alone underwrite the kind of continuous heavy commercial use planned by Nixon. The Freedom Ship might make a large target, but its high sides would create tricky turbulence. And there would be little margin for error. Imagine if a plane came in a few metres too low or skidded off the deck onto the public walkways below.

Nixon doesn’t understand these fears about the runways on the top deck: “These landings will be the easiest a pilot ever makes. Landings will always be upwind and there are no obstacles on either end of the runway as there could be on land.” He adds that the ship could probably survive 100 plane crashes without suffering significant damage: “You have to think in terms of 3 million tons, we are not building a day cruiser.”

In any case, without a flight deck how will people get into port? The massive dimensions of the Freedom Ship mean it cannot draw into harbour like a conventional vessel.

This docking problem is being turned into a commercial advantage. Because the Freedom Ship will stay off-shore permanently it will be able to trade as a duty-free shopping centre, 24 hours a day. But the return trip to shore on a ferry could take several hours, making planes a necessary alternative.

However, other operational drawbacks could scupper the Freedom Ship idea. Peter Wild, a cruise ship consultant of GP Wild International in Sussex, is worried about how they are going to scrape the barnacles off the bottom or maintain the engines: “Where are they going to find a dry dock big enough to do the job?”

And what about the threat of fire or running aground? These were cited in an Institution of Fire Engineers’ report last year as the two major causes of ship loss. The Freedom Ship’s global wanderings will take it into rough seas. The ship will be much too wide to fit through the Panama Canal so will have to haul around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. How will it handle in extreme weather?

As for fire, despite Nixon’s promise of state-of-the-art fire precautions, the Freedom Ship poses unusual fire risks simply because all residents will be cooking in their cabins and aircraft will be landing and refuelling on the top deck. Before the ship can be built, Wild says, would-be investors and insurers will have to be convinced of its safety.

But Wild says he is perhaps less sceptical about Nixon’s floating city than many others in the shipping industry. The modular design of the barge that the city will sit on-600 steel cells fabricated on shore then bolted together at sea to form an “unsinkable” flat hull-is a proven way of building oil platforms. The whole thing will be powered by a hundred tug-boat motors poking out of the bottom. But it will still mean a leap of faith and the oceans are an unforgiving place for experiment. McNeece agrees that apart from its flight deck the Freedom Ship is technically feasible. The main problem will be persuading people to risk money on such a grandiose idea.

However Nixon shrugs off these doubts: “We have been working on the design of the Freedom Ship for six years. No one has brought up a question concerning a subject we have not already solved. Or if we have not solved it, at least we know what has to be done to solve it.”

Fighting barnacles

The fact that the Freedom Ship will moor so far out at sea is not an issue either, he says. If travel time is a worry, the ship will simply employ high speed vessels like hydrofoils to do the ferrying. On maintenance, Nixon says there are now electronic devices that can ward off barnacles and paint which can be applied by divers underwater. The engines will retract for repairs and the modular construction of the ship means that rusty panels can be replaced one by one at sea.

Nixon has considered all the practical issues but is vague on the community aspects of the design, though he says there will be plenty of scope for fine-tuning the details as the needs of those signing up for apartments become clearer.

If demand to sail on the Freedom Ship continues at its present level, Nixon says, he will be getting started on planning the sister ship-or perhaps even a whole fleet of Freedom Ships. As to size, why not build bigger? Nixon says the existing design could easily be scaled up to double the capacity. And the more people aboard, the easier it becomes to create a self-sustaining economy. New ships could have hydroponic units to grow their own food or use futuristic energy sources like electricity-producing hydrogen fuel cells. In an increasingly over-crowded and climatically uncertain world, taking to the seas may even become a necessary escape.

Time will tell if there are enough brave investors to back Nixon’s vision. In the meantime, his attempt to turn a popular fantasy into a reality is proving to be worth any number of NASA feasibility studies. Now all that is needed is for someone to invent some sort of anti-gravity drive to be strapped to the bottom of the Freedom Ship and . . . space here we come!