Ping!......................
Fusion coming soon - for the past fifty years!
This entire article is premised on the idea that fusion is a reality - whereas it is and has for a long long time been “just 10 years away.” It was 10 years away in the 1960’s, and it’s still 10 years away now. Don’t hold your breath for this...
“reduce the time to reach Pluto from 9.5 years to just 4”
Has anybody considered what effect that would have on people?
Locked inside a sterile environment for 4 years, each way may not go over too well with even the most laid back personalities.
Hawking said that space is too vast and other intelligent civilizations too far away for contact to happen. So, what’s the point for going out there? For all practical purposes, there’s nothing there. At the very least, send robots, not humans.
The standard or tolerable limit for radio transmission time, will limit the distance of manned space flight.
Because, people are people.
If you collide with a micro meteoroid at 1 million mph, that is going to leave a mark!
Helium-3 here sounds like dilithium crystals: sci-fi technobabble to conjure a magical ingredient that somehow solves problems that we can’t even begin to address in the real world.
I was in the process of inventing a silly word to express the idea. On a whim, I googled on my confection and discovered that the word already exists: unobtanium.
(Once again demonstrating that great minds think alike... except, of course, they don’t ....)
Not only is helium-3 extremely rare on earth to the point of slipping into unobtanium territory, but we would presumably need vast quantities of it if we are going to distribute it across fleets of small vessels and use it as the foundation of man’s leap into spacefaring.
But hey, not a problem. Maybe we’ll find it on the moon. Maybe we’ll find it in Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream freezers or hidden in Bob Menendez’s house when investigators get to the bottom of the hoard of gold bars. The likeliest prospect? There may be vast oceans of it concealed beneath towering mountain ranges of grant money, and we need to start stacking those up. How high? There’s no telling, but we’ll know when we get to the unobtanium, and that’s worth it any price.
Dilithium crystals will probably be cheaper. Or go full Dune and start looking for giant sandworms and spice.
Speed won’t get us to other planets but time travel and figuring out worm holes etc will unless they figure out immortality.
“...clad in thick armor to resist cosmic radiation...”
How will the human passengers in tow behind this behemoth be protected from cosmic radiation after slipping out from inside the Earth’s magnetic field?
And I'm almost a billionaire.
Just lacking that one last little thing.
If Elon builds it, the RATs will reject it.