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New Lab Consolidates Propulsion Research Areas
zoid.com writes: "Nuclear-fusion drives, anti-matter protons and solar sails? NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center broke ground on a new administration and lab building for the Propulsion Research Center today. This lab will will be used to develop new propulsion concepts and techniques for the future of space exploration."
Fusion reactors and anti-matter drives sound cool, but do the math ... assuming these drives can propel a craft at one-tenth the speed of light, which is a speed of approximately 66.9 Million Miles Per Hour, it would still take 30 years to reach the nearest star.
Even if we don't reach the nearest star (and 10 percent of C is very optimistic for any drive built in the near future), we'd be able to reach anywhere in the solar system with much, much better transit times and fuel to mass ratios than we currently can. This is what we'd need to do widespread exploration/colonization.
Assuming we _can_ get to 10% C, it would _definitely_ be worth it to send probes to nearby systems. We know we can build craft that last that long, and it's very unlikely we'd find a better drive in only 30 years.
In short, advanced drives would still be very, very useful.
I'm not so sure what I think about this. I'm all for increased spending in advanced propulsion research, but it should be done with caution.
"Anti-matter is several years out," Rodgers said
HAHA several YEARS out? yeah right! Currently, it would cost more than the GNP of the United States to merely light a 75 watt light bulb with current Antimatter Power Techniques. (This is what I have heard, maybe this is no longer true, but I don't think anti-matter production techniques have improved that much in the last six months since I heard this).I would say it's more than just a few years out.
The work on anti-matter will be at the level of the atom, so there will be little safety threat in case of an accident, said Harry Gerrish, a chief research engineer at the lab.
Although Anti-matter power techniques may not leave a risk of nuclear fallout which is a major concern with Nuclear Fission, it still involves harnessing a ridiculously large amount of energy. We should be more concerned about a technology like this falling into people with malicious intent in mind, or those who simply don't know what they are doing. I'm sure that once anti-matter technology progresses to a certain level, it will be possible to annihalate the planet with relative ease. Perhaps technologies like anti-matter should be developed only after our society becomes mature enough that it can use and harness technologies such as anti-matter without the risk of destroying itself in the process.
The ultimate form of propulsion technology may not lie in making faster and better propulsion systems, such as antimatter, but the ability to control the mass and inertia of an object moving through space.A relativly new theory of inertia, in which the electromagnetic energy in the Zero-Point Field interacts with the electromagnetic and strong forces of atomswould provide a reason for inertia to happen. Until now we have known that inertia occurs, but beyond the fact that it is directly related with the mass of an object, scientists haven't been able to find the mechanism for it to occur. If these interactions could be controlled, those between the zero-point field and the electromagnetic bonds of atoms, an object's mass could be deminished to zero, and the object could travel at very close to the speed of light with almost no energy propeling it.
See Inertia as a Zero-Point Lorenz Force by B. Haischfor further information.