Future space travel for the next 100 years
In light of Bush's new budget for NASA how do you think interplanetary travel will play out in the next 100 years? So far we are still using chemical propulsion but this is far too slow as is the ion engines we currently use in probes. We have a few options in the near future though that are technically feasable using modern technology.
Plasma- jets of Ionized gas used to propell ac raft at high speeds.
Nuclear- Fission. We can make one of these now and they have been tested in lower earth atmosphere. Most of the problems lay in engineering safe reactors in craft going to be used in space. They work by propelling exaust from a nozzle or maybe to produce electricity to power a very high power high output ion engine. You can also use it to make a gas core rocket. In the gas-core rocket, radiant energy is transferred from a high-temperature fissioning plasma to a hydrogen propellant.
Fusion. Once fusion reactors are perfected they are much more efficient and to get extra Hydrogen you'de be able to mine it from any of the gas giants.
Antimatter- Antimatter is hard to produce but if this is overcome, it is the most efficient way to make energy.
More ideas can be found here: <a href="http://www.spaceref.com/directory/future_technology/nuclear_propulsion/"; target="_blank">http://www.spaceref.com/directory/future_technology/nuclear_propulsion/</a>;
I think in the immediate future we will see more Nuclear based rockets being tested and ultimately used (next 10-50 years). Next antimatter (50-100 years). Beyond that (100-200years) I think there will be something we never could imagine that will probably involve some use of shrinking spacetime locally to make point A and point B closer for a few seconds and piloting a craft in that region of space. As that inverted bubble expands again back to normal, it propels the craft foward at high speed.
Plasma- jets of Ionized gas used to propell ac raft at high speeds.
Nuclear- Fission. We can make one of these now and they have been tested in lower earth atmosphere. Most of the problems lay in engineering safe reactors in craft going to be used in space. They work by propelling exaust from a nozzle or maybe to produce electricity to power a very high power high output ion engine. You can also use it to make a gas core rocket. In the gas-core rocket, radiant energy is transferred from a high-temperature fissioning plasma to a hydrogen propellant.
Fusion. Once fusion reactors are perfected they are much more efficient and to get extra Hydrogen you'de be able to mine it from any of the gas giants.
Antimatter- Antimatter is hard to produce but if this is overcome, it is the most efficient way to make energy.
More ideas can be found here: <a href="http://www.spaceref.com/directory/future_technology/nuclear_propulsion/"; target="_blank">http://www.spaceref.com/directory/future_technology/nuclear_propulsion/</a>;
I think in the immediate future we will see more Nuclear based rockets being tested and ultimately used (next 10-50 years). Next antimatter (50-100 years). Beyond that (100-200years) I think there will be something we never could imagine that will probably involve some use of shrinking spacetime locally to make point A and point B closer for a few seconds and piloting a craft in that region of space. As that inverted bubble expands again back to normal, it propels the craft foward at high speed.
Comments
But not because it is difficult in the manner of producing it nor in the manner of stocking it. The problem is the quantity.
Ahh... and you think that's because we cannot produce enough antimatter ?
It is the contrary... It seems some people can now produce too much antimatter.
And few, very few people know this today.
Do you know the concept of the "Doom Day Machine" ? You could destruct a whole world with that hypothetical weapon. Not like a massive nuclear attack. Just with one shot. An antimatter bomb (hundreds of grammes) could destruct all life on Earth and vitrify all its surface, making it completly dry and sterile like a stone. If it explodes on a point of the planet the shock wave expands radially over the world until antipodal country. There is no winner.
So 100 g of antimatter is way too much. More dangerous than all the ballistic missiles in the nature.
In fact we know how to stock antimatter particles since a long time by electrostatic repulsion, in Leide bottles under high voltage, but you need a generator continuously powered. If the generator fails, you can say goodbye to your craft.
But now it can be stocked by another, 'safer' way : you beam anti-hydrogen inside a cristal (which is electrostatically neutral). The positron of the antihydrogen and an electron of the cristal annihil each other, and the orphan antiproton close the gap previously occupied by the electron. You make this several time and you obtain an antimatter cristal, stable. You crunch it to liberate its tremendous power.
All this takes a very long time with conventional manner of production (particle accelerators). Production of 100 g of antimatter would take hundreds of centuries to complete, almost as long as the completion of the PowerPC 8500.
This is the conventional manner.
The other way is terrific. You, Americans (your government, or more exactly your military forces), seem to have achieve this goal since 25 years. No one else has tried, and no one else has the idea of it (except the Soviets in 1954 which had the original idea, but they didnt' think that would produce antimatter, and they have never tried it BTW).
The manner is called "Megatonic Nuclear Compression". The classified project to achive it is known under the name of DSP 32 (Defense Support Program 32).
Basically you make a chamber underground (- 2 or -3 kms) and you place a big, megatonic atomic bomb in it. You know the principle of "hollow charge explosives" (not sure about the term in English, it is an explosive with a conical gap in it and when it is activated, the explosion displaces itself along a cone, which point can perfore any shielding).
The idea was to make an "atomic hollow charge" by magnetic driving. Big superconducting magnetic coils, around the atomic bomb, are activated with the bomb. The explosion is then magnetically focused in a very little point. No matter the coils are destructed within the explosion, because the current loops in the coils subsist in the form of circular plasma currents (plasma coils), and the magnetic force is still there during the processus.
The initial goal of making a weapon with the ability of perforing bunkers in mountains was exceeded when scientists discovered an anormal excess of power
They had discovered the most efficient antimatter creation process. Create antimatter by big "puffs".
After you slow down particles in a tunnel, a sort of "particle decelerator", and you stock it in cristals.
It is a longer story.
If you are interested I can talk with you about applications of this technology for plasma thrusters, weapons (what it has be done) and star travel (what it will eventually be done). One key word for this other part is "MPD".
<strong>Scott, that's only when an electron and positron annihillate eachother. They produce high energy photons. Now when you combine a proton and anti-proton, that's when you get something interesting. You get particles (many from one collision) with mass with high energy. Muons, Kaons, Pions, neutrons, protons, etc. With mass the particles can be funneled through a nozzel to produce thrust but also the heat can produce electricity too.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I guess so. I don't remember what you get from thermal p and p bars. Either way it will so go randomly anywhere. Even the gammas can generate momentum though. Maybe I'll do a google search.
I would venture a guess... of Inertial engines or variant(GIT - Gyroscopic Inertial Thruster), Overunity Generators and F/E, gigantic space structures and moon bases, we will begin to terraform mars and maybe even start moving out farther than pluto into real deep space missions...
that is if we dont blow ourselves up first... WW3?
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E PLURIBUS UNIX
[ 02-07-2002: Message edited by: FERRO ]</p>
<strong>Well at the least in an electron positron collision, the gammas produce lots of heat that can be used for electricity generation..</strong><hr></blockquote>
The gammas carry momentum. If one hits the "ship" and is absorbed then it will push it just a little.
Interesting idea but it requires a lot of time to get to really useful speeds (like ion engines) but once you do it is fast.
Even that is not certain. With medical advances in 50-100 years we may find a way to prolong life to 150-200 years. Technology and medicine has increased exponetially in the last 100 years.
<strong>in 100 years I'll be dead
. Technology and medicine has increased exponetially in the last 100 years.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes, but not in the past 20 years. Seems to me more like a logistic curve than an exponential curve.
I wouldn't mind living for 300 years, well....If I was the only person on the earth that would live that long, I would get lonely cause all my friends and stuff would die and I would probably become partially obsolete
I wish I could just be in a posistion to observe and watch civilization grow and devlop without necessarilly taking an active part in it....heres hoping to a fitted after life!
For the technological part, I don't think we should create bunches of antimatter (stored in big conteners) because it is too dangerous. Instead we should create antimatter on the fly, in relatively poor quantities stocked in little cristals (in fact just the ammount we need to accomplish a special task).
There is basically two ways for using nuclear energy in order to propel a spaceship.
The first is to explode bombs behind the craft, and the explosions push it. You do it 50 or 100 times and you get very high speeds. You do it with hydrogen bombs (fusion). it is a heavy mean.
You can also extract the power from a nuclear reaction and use it for electricity generation. It is smarter. But we only know how to control fission reactions (uranium). Hydrogen fusion reactions (the reactions in the sun, 10 times the power of fission) is not yet controlable. We only know to use it in breve manner in H-bombs. We don't know how to consume it slower.
There are two experimental ways of research to control fusion :
1- The toroidal confinment magnetic chamber or "Tokamak" invented by Andreï Sakharov in the 50's. The fusion plasma is so hot that no existing material can support its heat : it would melt. Sakharov's brillant idea was to replace the physical wall by an immaterial wall: the magnetic field. The plasma is maintained locked up in an annular room (like a bicycle tire tube or a donut. mmmmh...doh-nuts) made by magnetic coils, and the plasma never touch the wall.
Then you can heat it by different means (microwaves is one of them). This apparatus is heavy, huge, and is subject to instabilities. We don't know if we will even achieve controlled fusion with it, but it is worth the try. Canada, Europe, Russia and Japan have united to build the biggest (non-military) tokamak ever : <a href="http://www.iter.org"; target="_blank">ITER</a>
Why not Americans ? Perhaps because they want to achieve it alone, or perhaps because tokamaks are now an old and antiquated technology for you
2- The inertial confinment with terawatt lasers. Experienced at the LLL (Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Sandia since the 80's. You put a little hydrogen ball (1 or 2 mm) in the center of a chamber where several lasers point to, and you shot terawatts energy on this little ball. Its strips transforms itself into a plasma that explodes towards outside and implodes inside, compressing hydrogen in the ball. The compression must be powerful enough to initiate fusion reactions in the ball. The ball is way more little than the plasma of a tokamak, but you make this with several balls per second. It acts like a nuclear explosion motor (injection, compression, explosion, exhaust). Vrrrrrrr...
I think both could achieve fusion, but both need a "bonus item". Some scientists think that with this "plus", we could make tokamaks 5 meters-wide instead of 20 meters-wide now.
Some chemical reactions can be powered more easier and quickier with help of "catalysts". Chemical reactions are just electron recombination in atoms and nuclear reaction are no more than nucleus recombination in atoms. It is a different level, 100 times more powerful.
Antimatter is 1000 times more powerful. And dangerous to manipulate.
but what a super catalyst for a nuclear motor...
What would a cristal of antimatter do if it was "thrown" in the plasma of a tokamak ? Wouldn't this help a lot the fusion reaction ?
I talk about fusion reactions by antimatter catalyst, and 5 or 2 meters-wide nuclear motor, inside a craft that can produce several millions amperes and thousands volts.
What we could do of such an ammount of electricity ?
You were talking about ion motors (accelerate ions with an electric field). This is a good idea but the specific impulse is a bit low and the craft acceleration takes a lot of time.
A much, much powerful plasma motor is the MPD thruster.
(MagnetoPlasmaDynamic). The plasma is controlled and accelerated by a powerful combination of electric an magnetic forces inside. You need very high ammount of power though. Basically it is based on Lorentz forces and the science branch which studies all these interactions is MHD (MagnetoHydroDynamic). MHD is in the works with solar wind, galaxy gaz dynamics, electricity generation, fluid acceleration and motion control, and in hypersonic skyplanes like Aurora (USA) and <a href="http://cromagnon.stanford.edu/afosr/summaries/summary-agarwal.pdf"; target="_blank">Ajax</a> (Russia).
More on this later, whereas my post will fill all the page !
[ 02-07-2002: Message edited by: Prim ]</p>
This is an interesting idea. How would we go about doing this? My first thought would be basically installing a particle accelerator in a craft that is specifically designed for antimatter creations and using particles that would yeild the most amount of antimatter. My understanding of antimatter creation is that the faster a particle is hurled againt each other or a target, the more it produces. Because faster=more energy the particle has. Also when you speed matter up to near light speeds, it's mass increases exponentially towards infinity. You can never accelerate matter to 100% of c but individual particles it is possible to acheive 95-99.9%.
As far as Ion engines go, how about a forced induction Ion engine, where you force a dense stream of charged ions (H neucleus maybe) through it instead of using a ram scoop to get ions from around space. But maybe this is the idea behing high output plasma engines.
How about if you use electromagnetic magnets to spin a dense cloud of matter in front of a ship until it creats an artificial singularity. That way it warps space in front of the ship and as the ship accelerates into that compacted region and the singularity collapses and therefore re-expands, it propells the ship foward at high speed.
NERVA was axed in the 1973 due to environmental and durability concerns, but it is easily possible today with enough money. Perhaps Bush wants to revive NERVA and Nuclear Thermal Propulsion in hopes of reaching Mars within 20 years. The journey to Mars in a NERVA-like system would take 2 months while a chemical based system would likely take 6 months.
<strong>My understanding of antimatter creation is that the faster a particle is hurled againt each other or a target, the more it produces.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Sure it works. It produces antimatter but not enough. Like little drops would fill a huge billion liters water-tank.
A part of sciences physics not very well studied is the ultra dense states of matter. In a cyclotron you study high energy collisions, but the density is ultra low. The key concept about megatonic nuclear compression is to create as much density as in a neutron star (which eventually forms what is known as "black hole"). And see what it results.
Some theories speak about modification of the atomic geometry (the dimensions of a particle inside the space-time) when they are under very high pressure (pressure = energy).
You cannot achieve this by concentrating matter with magnets, because your amount of matter would be as high as in a star... too big. In a neutron star the electrostatic repulsion force between neutrons becomes lower than the gravitic forces, cause of the huge density. The neutrons in the center of the star can't counterbalance the weight and they collapse. The star implodes. What takes place next is unknown.
Read carefully : you wouldn't especially need a large amount of atoms in one place like a star. Because you would have enough energy to distribute in a little time, all you need is enough atoms per mm (or cm3, or m3, you see the idea) concentrated by enough energy. One would rather focus huge energy on a very little point. This is the concept: the more the energy, the less the number of atoms. There is a though (~ 100.000.000 the atmospheric pressure). Antimatter would result of this compression.
So a fusion bomb explodes, the explosion is focused on a point by magnetism, then the matter in this little point collapse and its geometry (aka some of its dimensions, there is no less than 10 or 11 dimensions in modern quantic theories, no just 3 or 4) changes. When I talk about geometry of a particle, I mean :
- C (Charge: positive or negative)
- P (Parity: levogyre or dextrogyre, for example your right hand, dextrogyre, appears as a left hand, levogyre, when you see it in a mirror)
- T (Time, the direction of the own "time arrow" of the particle)
When you invert the CPT symetry of a particle you obtain... its antiparticle ! There is also a polemic on this : since 'T' is inverted, is an antiparticle 'retrochrone', does it go 'backward' in time ? Physisists prefer to say that antiparticles follow their own inverted time into our universe made of matter, and that we, people made of matter, would follow our own 'inverted time' in an anti-universe made of antimatter. I stop on this here because it becomes a bit complicated.
We could then ask the question : what really occurs in the point where all the matters invert itself inside-out-top-below into antimatter ? Does it just create antimatter ? does it create a black hole and then antimatter ? but the question is : does black holes exist ?
The black hole is well estabished in the press, but is a perfect mathematical nonsense. The equation itself needs, in order to be true, a whole hollow universe, without any particle inside it. But we are here, aren't we...
The fact that neutron stars collapse is demonstrated, that's OK. What is not demonstrated is what occurs right after the implosion. Some newest theories states that black holes exist, but not as the form as we think: The star collapse, bend and tear the space-time, open a hole, , and then the hole is closed. The star has disapeared from our universe.
I will continue another day. Good evening. I mean... good afternoon for you