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Antimatter Space Drive
sckienle writes "Space.com has an article on using anti-matter for propulsion in space. It isn't true Star Trek warp stuff, in fact it is a variation on an fusion based pellet design I saw in the late 70's, but interesting concept. The concept is still somewhat of a dream, as stated in the article: 'The real hub is the storage [of antimatter]. There's a lot of technology between here and there.' Later on it also mentions that we can't produce a lot of antimatter efficiently yet. Still it might be worth the effort if the theoretical acceleration proves out." The BBC has a story about studying antimatter in a lab.
We'll see antimatter missles :(
It isn't impossible. By using a strong magnetic field, you could store antimatter in a vaccum without contact with the walls of the container. However, if the field were to fail at all, anhiliation would come pretty quick.
Thanks to movies and television series such as Star Trek and especially Star Wars, most people have no idea just exactly how far another star system is.
The closest star is Tau Ceti, which is 4.7 Light years away, would still take a decade to reach and a decade to return even with a very, very, very advanced anti-matter engine -- a space shuttle with chemical engines, in comparsion, would take 100,000 years to reach there.
Anti-matter still costs approximately 40 quadrillion dollars per gram to make, and storing it and dealing with the gamma rays is quite another thing.
Sorry, sci-fi fans: we will never visit another star system in our lifetimes, and probably not even Mars with the amount of funding that goes to space.
"That is quite possibly the most circuitous way I have ever seen someone admit that something is impossible. Fascinating."
Sorry Mr. Spock, think you missed the point of what he was saying.
"The real hub is the storage," Howe says. "There's a lot of technology between here and there."
What he means is that it's not as simple as a gas tank.
Indeed. It's like saying that an exoflop (or op) supercomputer is impossible.
It is. Right now.
However, give us 20 years, then easily you'll have it.
After all, it's just technology between here and there.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
"...but the cost needs to be taken down by something like nine orders of magnitude"
I know that's an issue, but I'm not convinced that's the biggest issue. The biggest issue is safety. Anti-matter is hard to contain. Imagine if gasoline violent explodeded when exposed to air. Nobody'd wanna put that into their cars.
However, if Anti-matter were capable of powering ships capable of say... travelling to one of Mars or Jupiter's moons for the sake of bringing back large quantities of valuable minerals, then you'd find a great deal of effort going into anti-matter generation.
When safety goes up and demand goes up, the price will magically fall as a bunch of places jump on board to start extracting it. (or converting a better word? I can't remember how anti-matter is generated.)
Actually, it's Alpha Centauri at about 4.2 light years.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
in the case of antimatter propellant, instead of a reactive force, the propellant will just annhilate the surrounding matter
While this reasoning is completely valid. They are not proposing simply injecting antimatter into a combustion chamber. The point is that they will use antimatter in combination with matter (similar to the way they use both oxygen and nitrogen in today's spacecraft). That way the inject matter and the inject antimatter ahihilate each other, causing a large release of energy which propels the spacecraft forward.
neurostarDon't forget what the cost of a pound of conventional fuel is when it is shot into space.
love is just extroverted narcissism
If the guys who built the foundations of the Net back in the Sixties and Seventies had said, "there's a lot of technology between here and there" -- which would have been a perfectly accurate statement at the time -- would you have told them that they were admitting that what they were trying to do was impossible?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
it costs more energy to produce than it actually stores
I'd certainly hope so. Otherwise, we're going to have to reconsider quite a lot of modern physics!
There's a lot of technology between here and there
So you're basically saying that your invention won't work until someone invents a way to make it work? Call me crazy, but I don't think it's much of an invention if you need someone to fix the technology gap for you...
Oh, I just thought that possibly you can't get a lot of output in a collider because antimatter tends to re-combine with matter and gets lost again. Hm.
Silly me.
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
There are already numerous propulsion ideas that are not only feasible but much better than anything that is used today.
The issue is that anything inolving nuclear power is a political impossibility, at least for another generation. Antimatter drives have exactly the same issues (hum... or maybe this is not widely understood... 'antimatter' sounds much better than 'nuclear'...)
Tor
I think I read that matter and antimatter, while being equal, are not. In our universe, it takes more animatter to destroy matter. See the other atricle titled "One of Many"
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The magnetic containment doesn't have to be electromagnetic. Natural permanent magnets have nearly 0 chance of failure. The little plastic fruits have been sticking to my grandmother's fridge for 50 years now.
-B
But permanent magnets aren't strong enough. You need some very strong magnetic fields to confine antimatter, and permanent magnets just don't come anywhere close to what can be done with electromagnets.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.