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NASA to Research Antimatter Rocket
Fraser Cain writes "One of the dozen technologies selected by NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) this year is Positronics Research's ideas for an antimatter rocket engine. Instead of 3100 kg of propellant on board Cassini, the spacecraft could get by with just 310 micrograms of electrons and positrons. Of course, making the antimatter can be expensive."
But seriously folks...
Many of our upcoming challenges both earthbound and space bound relate to the safe, efficient, portable, and inexpensive generation of HUGE amounts of power. Whether it's antimatter, zero-point energy, fusion, whatever, let's get something off the drawing board and into service.
My laptop is more powerful than a 1975 supercomputer that filled a room, but a D cell battery hasn't changed its size in 30 years and today's best D cell lasts what 2, 3 times as long as one from 1975? We're still running coal-based and oil-based power plants that were built in the '70s. Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
Start a happiness pandemic
One of the major problems with antimatter is that you need to be able to contain it very very securely. The actualy weight of the antimatter may be substantially less, but the whole infrastructure to create it and contain it is going to be considerably more complex and expensive.
see a Text Widget
It's going to take insane amounts of energy to generate and store that much antimatter. Hopefully this leads to increased funding for particle accelerators though.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Antimatter isn't as dangerous as you seem to think it is. Even 5 kg of the stuff would only produce a 100-megaton blast. And would cost $125 trillion. Nukes are still more dangerous.
If you want some kind of doomsday device to worry over, consider strangelets and particle accelerators instead.
5000g x (3x10^8)^2 = 4.5 x 10^20 joules.
That's fully 10 times more powerful than the tsunami quake.
Yeah, and I hope it never gets easier to make and store. Antimatter would be the ultimate WMD - if it ever gets to the point where a small group of whackos could synthesize a gram or two and contain it in a refridgerator-size vessel civilization is pretty much over.
>Third: containment part three: if it fails it will give the a real nice flash.
No matter what kind of rocket it is, it has enough stored energy to put its payload into orbit.
For any given amount of payload, an antimatter rocket is actually going to be lighter than a chemical rocket. It doesn't have to carry the weight of chemical reactants. It doesn't have to lift that weight. Same payload, less total energy.
Best of all, gamma rays don't travel very far in air, so as long as you maintain the same range safety distances as you would for a chemical rocket, there's no extra hazard.
If you think Microsoft is hard on it's competitors (or percieved future competitors), just imagine an industry thousands of times larger that is run by people thousands of times meaner... That's the energy industry.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Okay, so you've got all the energy you can use. You still need to throw something out the nozzle at high speed in order to move -- the rocket equation will not be denied. I'm skeptical about the "10% of conventional propellant" figure, and even more so about scooping propellant out of raw space.
Second: containment part two: To power it, you would need a energy source of such capacity that could feed an ion drive or equivalent just fine without the need for antimatter.
But antimatter would do it and you've already got that. It just means factoring in an extra bit for its own containment.
Who ordered that?
Honestly, antimatter is no more an "ultimate" WMD than nukes are -- if you blow up a city, it really doesn't matter to the inhabitants of that city that someone did it with antimatter rather than, say, an unaccounted-for Soviet-era nuclear weapon. The reason I'm not terribly worried about antimatter-toting terrorists is the same reason I'm a lot more worried about terrorists getting pre-made nukes than I am about them building one from scratch: it takes a tremendous knowledge base and industrial infrastructure that is beyond the capacity of even the biggest and best-funded terrorist group.
Worrying about terrorists with WMD's makes sense. Worrying about antimatter research in that context is just silly.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You never launch such a rocket from the surface of Earth under its own power; you use those rockets when already in space. The almost all of the "exhaust" in each case has enough energy to escape the solar system.
Getting that much radioactive material into space? Yes, there would be controversy about that (assuming that you couldn't mine it in space). But actually using the engine? I think that the relevant portion of the populace would accept that if the exhaust isn't staying in the solar system, there's nothing to worry about (and even if it was staying in the solar system, when you discuss how vast the solar system is and thus how slowly any of it would impact Earth, they would accept that as well).
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.