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To: cripplecreek

The man developing the thing has a mission profile that will take you to Mars in about two weeks. Serious as a heart attack.

The spacecraft would accelerate halfway to it’s destination, go to a brief coast, turn the opposite direction, then kick in thrust again. Thrust is an acceleration, and it produces massive velocities. The spacecraft in this case would carry a great deal of fuel to do this, but not anything we couldn’t manage. Imagine a half-dozen liquid hydrogen tanks clustered around the ship, each about the size of a Shuttle external tank. You’d have to assemble the ship in orbit.

(Oh, BTW - that’s what we’ve done with ISS. Probably its greatest value, and not a small contribution to science and engineering.) :)


16 posted on 04/14/2009 3:46:50 PM PDT by Frank_Discussion (May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather!)
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To: Frank_Discussion
a mission profile that will take you to Mars in about two weeks.

Wow, that's pretty incredible. Something like that would be even more effective for deeper space missions like to the Kuiper belt or even Ort cloud missions. A little gravity assist around the sun and it could pass the voyager probes that were launched in the 70s within a couple of years.
19 posted on 04/14/2009 3:54:51 PM PDT by cripplecreek (The poor bastards have us surrounded.)
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