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

yum

[theheff]

Antimatter. It's what's for dinner.

so much stupidity

[william_w_bush]

I'm really sorry, I love the dream of space as much as the next 5 guys, but holy shit man, this is something humans shouldn't fuck with.

think about this:
do you really, REALLY want governments, you know the ones who screw up taxes and cause silly wars for dumb, and usually misleading reasons, and which are generally ruled by an colorful balance of power between charismatic megalomaniacs, and a relatively disinformed electorate, to develop and maintain the ability to produce a substance, 5 grams of which could destroy the actual structure of the planet, kaboom gone.

no seriously, i love physics, but, barring a whole lot of psychologic evolution in the next couple millenia, no humans should not ever ever ever ever have this kind of power at our disposal.

i mean icbm's on 15 minute notice are enough for us to deal with at the moment, once the ability to produce it is developed everyone is going to say they need it for defense, ala nukes, and unlike nuclear weapons, these don't really have a shelf-life, you have to keep the anti-matter magnetically bottled forever, or boom again.

this whole idea just scares me stupid, i'd rather give schoolchildren 5kt nukes than let the military work out scenarios about force application with an infinitely powerful tactical device that can be carried in a briefcase.

oh yeah, and unlike fission bombs, if you have the knowledge to make antimatter, you don't need any fissionable material, so as technology gets better it will be easier for "insert bad guy here" to make this, just takes a good cyclotron, some magnetic containment, and time.

would be a great technology, but i don't want to die.

Re:Re:zero-point energy no chance!

[the_2nd_coming]

entropy of the SYSTEM is not effected. that has no bearing on the entropy of each particle.