'Impossible' rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours

The Telegraph ^ | July 28, 2015 | Sarah Knapton

[massgopguy]

LUDUCROUS SPEED NOW!!

[bunkerhill7]

“It produces thrust by using solar power”

Doesn`t work at night at all.

[Kartographer]

"But where will we get the dilythium crystals to run the thing?"

Dilythium crystals are for the warp drive silly! Every 1st year Star Fleet Cadet knows that!

[jjotto]

Unmanned vehicle could handle constant 3+ g’s, but doubtful a human could and be worth anything once there.

[ThomasMore]

lol.... not sure of the thrust needed to slow down enough to go into orbit around the moon...but I would assume it would be huge...with a load of time needed to decrease speed at a reasonable g force. But I believe someday we’ll have this technology and greater.

[bigdaddy45]

And its always dark in space. So obviously this thing won’t work.

[JusPasenThru]

Good luck, and thanks for all the fish.

[expat2]

The other ‘new’ approach is to use the solar wind. It produces a very little acceleration, but that acceleration continues to build up the velocity with time, to very high values, because there is no friction and air drag in space.

[Jaxter]

Holding out for warp drive!

[nomad]

Homina, Homina...

[loungitude]

Yep, hope they got good brakes. Or they could just us parachute ... right?

[edwinland]

“The problem is slowing down.”

Good point. By my rough math you would be travelling at about 50 million miles an hour by the time you reach Alpha Centauri 100 years from now.

You’d barely have time to take a picture out the window.

[Darteaus94025]

Yeah?

[DBrow]

“The problem is slowing down.”

The article hints that there is no conservation of momentum, so start/stop acceleration may not be a problem.

[zeugma]

I’ve read about this before. I was unaware that they’d managed to get it to produce any large effects. If so, that’s bloody awesome. I doubt something like this can be used to escape the earth’s gravity well, but once out there, it opens up some interesting possibilities. Inter-solar exploration would be greatly enhanced if we had propulsive systems in our probes as well.

[zeugma]

Sounds like it would work a lot better than that buggy Improbability Drive.

Improbability fields are inherently dangerous, as the more improbable a given thing is, the more likely it is to actually occur in the field. Bistromathematics is a great improvement. Can't wait to go see Disaster Area!

[JJ_Folderol]

>>> And its always dark in space. So obviously this thing won’t work. <<<

Obviously. When it’s dark you need a wind generator.

Problem solved.

[Army Air Corps]

I always thought that Transparent Aluminum was just another way of saying Aluminum Oxide. ;-)

[dsrtsage]

We can’t build it, not only was it developed by an oppressive white guy, but it will also make muslims feel bad about their contributions to math and science

[jimjohn]

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