I knew Dr. Dana Andrews about 13 years ago. He is one smart engineer. I hear good things about his son too.
I knew Dr. Dana Andrews about 13 years ago. He is one smart engineer. I hear good things about his son too.
space ping
0.1C, holy moly! Alpha Centauri in 43 years!
will be able to reach speeds of approximately 10% of the speed of light———————————————————————67,061,662.92 mph / Obviously, this dude is smoking some good stuff !
Well, it’s no torch ship :-) but it’s a nice start to practicable interplanetary flight.
Hmmm, interesting. Of course we’ve long had ion propulsion with very low/slow but steady forces involved. I remember an earth to moon mission once that used it to s-l-o-w-l-y inch its way out of the terran gravity well and into the lunar gravity well. Its developer said that if oxygen and food had been available for weeks, even months, the apollo spacecraft could have gotten there on 1/4 the fuel.
Be as it may, this is still a theoretical concept, and finding FUNDING for it will be the BIG CLIMB out of the earth’s gravity well for it. Congress? Forget it. They’ve run us $9T in debt, no hope there.
Speaking of space propulsion concepts, have you heard of the magnetic sail? There you have a 1 km diameter ring of superconductor, about a pencil width in size. It sets up a dipole field and depending on orientation to the solar wind it either drops inward toward venus/mercury or outward to mars and beyond.
The dipole field also keeps out solar wind charged particles. A spider web of cables tie from the ring to a central cabin and merely by offsetting the cabin from the center you change the orientation.
Once in orbit then there is no fuel required, the solar WIND is your “fuel”, just as with the sailing ships of old. Anyway, I thought it was a neat idea(expressed in the science fact section of ANALOG sci-fi mag).
(It would be great if these space threads got hundreds of comments).
bump for later reading
Doesn't the STS ME produce a couple million pounds of thrust? Sounds pretty good.
It uses fissile material, but the explosion is non nuclear?
Gonna need some help with that one.