Behind the Scenes & Under the Hood: Virtuality’s Antimatter Spacecraft Engine

Discover Magazine ^ | 07/15/09

[KevinDavis]

Today we present a very special installment of the Codex Futurius, Science Not Fiction’s look at the big scientific ideas in sci-fi: Kevin Grazier—JPL physicist and friend of SNF—gives an insider’s peek at the workings of and discussion around the Orion antimatter drive used to propel the Phaeton starship in Ron D. Moore’s recent TV movie, Virtuality. Grazier was a science adviser for the movie (which was intended to be the pilot for an ongoing show), so he was right in the middle of these discussions. The screenshot further down in this post shows the actual spreadsheet used in the production to see what stars would be reachable with the Orion drive. Without further ado, here’s some sci in your sci-fi:

[KevinDavis]

[sig226]

Great. All we need is some anti-matter. :)

[2harddrive]

A kess difficult and more PRACTICAL achievement would be the ULTIMATE weapon - the Antimatter Bomb! 100 times the power of the H-bomb!

[2harddrive]

The Antimatter would have to be enclosed in a magnetic bottle, with a vacuum around it, to keep regular matter away, until it was ready for detonation, of course.

[tophat9000]

put me on you ping list please

[Bratch]

[texas booster]

A favorite scifi story has scientists traveling to another star, only to kill and mutate the life in the other star system with hard radiation when they turned the ship around to decelerate.

[Lancey Howard]

The Antimatter would have to be enclosed in a magnetic bottle, with a vacuum around it, to keep regular matter away, until it was ready for detonation, of course.

Nah...

When I was a kid (1960s) I designed an anti-matter spacecraft that simply stacked two particle accelerators (the round kind) on top of each other: one produced a certain stream of particles and the other produced the appropriate anti-matter stream of particles. The two accelerators would simultaneously throw their carefully calibrated streams of matter and anti-matter into a chamber where the resulting collisions would produce the violent explosions necessary to become a propellant force.

In other words, there is never any need to store anti-matter - - it is created and used as needed.

I must have doodled 200 versions of this craft.

[wastedyears]

This one has been proven to work.

[wastedyears]

Something like this from the movie 'Angels & Demons'?

[Vaquero]

I canna change the laws of physics. You can't mix matter and antimatter cold unless you'd like to turn the ship into a fireball.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Man....that was a really, really bad movie.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks KevinDavis.

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