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."

Comments

Scotty, we... need... more... power!

[gbulmash]

The problem is that they won't be able to create sufficiently powerful and controllable anti-matter engines until they secure a sufficient supply of dilithium crystals.

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?

Re:Scotty, we... need... more... power!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

2005: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."

2006: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."

(...)

2077: "I predict that zzz1357 will die this year."

Sooner or later, the doomsayers are always right.

Containment

[moz25]

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.

Re:Expensive to produce

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.