Vasimr engines were among the leading prospects for project Deadelus but we're still years from building in space where it would have to be done at enormous cost.
Posted on 11/24/2012 1:33:34 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.
The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea here is that, although no material objects can travel faster than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime expansion during the period of cosmological inflation was about 30 million billion times the speed of light...
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmag.com ...
There would be no acceleration; the ship does not move in the normal space. The acceleration (such as stretching of the space) occurs within an infinitely thin border of the bubble, but that border is far enough from the outer walls of the spacecraft.
As an example, take a sailor inside a submarine. The submarine may be moving pretty fast underwater, but the sailor is not feeling any pressure of water - there is some other shell, well away from him, that takes care of that. As far as the sailor is concerned, he is not moving anywhere.
At the rate the Dollar degrades- by then you might just be likely have that in your checking account.
Space stations and stuff can be colonies of a sort.
Give Obama a few more terms and you will beg for a patch of land on Pluto.
Yes.
Supposedly from the point of view of the object being ‘accelerated’, it actually doesn’t move or notice any kind of G force of any kind.
Supposedly.
Whether or not a practical actual working model does what it is supposed ot do, well...
..that would be the interesting part.
As your speed approaches or reaches c, your apparent mass reaches or exceeds that of a planet.
Your actual mass does not change at all.
But you would be gravitationally slinging things around you.
Again, supposedly.
If mankind lives long enough, we may actuially see whether or not this is true.
goodness!!
And the municipal judge is in the Pleiades.
2012 and I am still walking on the pavement.
psss!
A simple Infinite Improbability Drive!
That's a huge amount of territory.
The Orion drive is another interesting idea that would also need to be built in space. (mostly because you’ll never be able to launch that kind of nuclear payload into space)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
I personally think propulsion advances are the key to true human spaceflight.
But those are really harsh environments and it would cost a lot of money to colonize them. /s lol
That is true, but unfortunately it’d be impossible to start a new country in those places.
Zero’s too busy promoting trains and putting people on food stamps.
He’ll settle for Uranus.
Yeah but, with all this stretching of space going on, what happens when you try to come back the other way?
Does space start getting compressed again? What about "stretch" marks?
You could run into a wrinkle in time.
I may need to go out and sit on a rock in my back yard to ponder this.
Think of it this way. You are on the open sea in a boat and not moving but the sea is rushing past you.
lol
good questions
Hopefully it won’t permanently damage the fabric of space-time.
(I actually wrote a story once where a technology did just that, tear holes in the fabric of space... I lost it a while back though... drat)
There is nothing wrong with trains provided there are enough people who want to ride them where they are going.
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