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NASA Researching Antimatter Engines
dbolger writes: "CNN has a story about how scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama are researching ways to use antimatter to fuel missions to Mars and beyond within the next 50 years. It very light on technical details, but does give an interesting look at current and future potential uses of antimatter."
There is something definately wrong with the picture on cnn.com. This picture looks very wrong someone must have been thinking bad thoughts at the time.
I thought you needed a reactor core with dilithium crystal to make a matter-antimatter reaction possible. Can NASA produce dilithium crystals yet ? and visors for the reactor core technicians ?
Is antimatter really being used for medical imaging? Considering the trouble it is to make, it seems like antimatter wouldn't be cost effective for this kind of use, and would be overkill for the cancer treatment proposed in this article. I could use a reference link here if anyone knows of one.
I can see the advantage in propulsion since so much of the weight of our current rockets is fuel, and most of that fuel is spent lifting other fuel.
However, if we have to create our own antimatter from scratch, the amount of fuel needed to travel to the nearest star (a common goal for which anti-matter is often considered a solution) would probably overtax our planet's energy resources. (This is presuming we don't just find a huge supply of antimatter hiding behind Saturn or something -- which isn't likely from what we think we know about the universe.)
So antimatter, like wormholes, would probably become just a plaything for the rich. I predict it will be used for the ultimate in opulent jewelry.
I really doubt this is is something we'll see any time soon. I mean, we don't have inertial dampeners. Or structural integrity fields. What about the ODN lines or EPS taps? Can NASA vent drive plasma yet? I don't want anything leaving the ground until we can reroute warp power through the main deflector, recalibrate the phase discriminator, and backflush the bussard collectors. Do we have deuterium purge vents, final stage magnatomic flux contrictors, impulse syncrotron units, impulse-deflection crystals, isolinear chips, Jeffries tubes, LCARS displays, matter/antimatter mix chambers, navigational deflector grids, power transfer conduits, RCS thrusters, tractor beam emitters, biomatter resequencers, duotronics, interphase generators, isomagnetic disintegrators, replicators, or SELF SEALING STEM BOLTS? My god, how could we get by without the SELF SEALING STEM BOLTS? Do we have doppler and heisenberg compensators or pattern enhancers and buffers? Do we have phaserbanks or photorps do defend ourselves? Do we have ablative armor or regenerative and metaphasic shielding? If we had shielding, could we rotate the frequency? Do we have PADDs, tricorders, hyperspanners, hyposprays and multispatial probes as tools? NO! We are NOT ready for this.
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... it gives a whole new meaning to the term "vaporware."
You'd rather have something reliable whose traces will not be overwhelmed by particle bombardment in Space.
That's why NASA uses prehistoric microprocessors (when it uses any).
And commercial Clarke-Orbit communication satellite are even more "primitive": no microprocessors at all. Just discrete wired logic.
Because it's a fucking long way to press the "reset" button if the processor hangs...
> Was this guy good or what?
What.
Aliens = humans with lumps of rubber glued to their heads. (More recently evolved species sometimes have patterns of tatooing as well.)
Spaceship = flying palace with hallways wide enough to make the owners of a luxury liner jealous, but no spares for parts on critical pathways. Also, lots of ways for enemies to take over some vital system and lock out access by the crew, rather than vice versa.
Tactical Doctrine = if the air is breathable then send down the captain, the first officer, the science officer, the ship's doctor, a helmsman, the security chief, and one expendable crewman, to see what destroyed the colony and left no survivors.
Plot = an intelligent * takes over the * because it wants *, and the crew would have all *ed if * hadn't figured out that * would make it go away without killing anyone.