Photonic Laser Thruster Promises Earth to Mars in a Week

serutan writes "Using lasers to drive spaceships has been a subject of interest for many years, but making a photonic engine powerful enough for practical use has been elusive. Dr. Young Bae, a California physicist, has built a demonstration photonic laser thruster that produces enough thrust to micro-maneuver a satellite. This would be useful in high-precision formation flying, such as using a fleet of satellites to form a space telescope with a large virtual aperture. Scaled up, a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week."

Comments

not this again

[ILuvRamen]

Anyone know why they keep trying to make extremely super low energy particles and modes of movement into rocket thrusters? If you turn on a flashlight or laser pointer, do you go flying backwards from the kick back? How about if you light off a flashlight sized model rocket motor while holding it? I mean seriously, if they'd been focusing on technologies that are traditionally used to create thrust instead of seeing how they can trick the weakest possible thrust methods into working as an engine, I'd be posting this FROM MARS! This is almost as bad as that giant million mile wide solar sail thing that was supposed to capture the forward energy from particles that barely qualifiy as mass. Oh here's an idea, why don't they take a billion of those little handheld electric fans and try and thrust it out of our atmosphere with that. One of them creates more thrust in an atmoshpere than the equal volume of photon's for God's sake.