Turning a source of heat – such as concentrated sunlight – into useful power (say, electrical power) is not an easy proposition. There’s a dizzying array of options – thermal engines using different thermodynamic cycles, photovoltaic arrays, thermoelectrics and thermionic conversion. The last was used extensively in early space power generators using small reactors or
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Using Carbon-NanoTube (CNT) sheets that we can make now, we might push towards ~2,200 km/s. Of course there will be structural mass and the payload reducing the top speed – thus we might hit ~1,800 km/s tops with CNT sheets, if made perfectly reflective. Even for lower reflectivity the speed will be about ~1000-1500 km/s.
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Carbon is the material of the Future. Graphite, graphene, bucky-balls and nanotubes all have amazing properties. And then there’s diamond – which seems to come in several varieties, albeit rare and/or theoretical. Making enough of any of the allotropes – different carbon forms – is rather tricky, aside from raw graphite, which can be mined.
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Just beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt, a torus of comet-like objects, which includes a few dwarf-planets like the Pluto-Charon dual-planet system. Despite being lumped together under one monicker, the Belt is composed of several different families of objects, which have quite different orbital properties. Some are locked in place by the gravity of the
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Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “2312″ is set in that titular year in a Solar System alive with busy humans and thousands of artificial habitats carved from asteroids. Earth is a crowded mess, home to eleven billion humans, but no longer the home of thousands of species, now only preserved, flourishing in fact, in the
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Father & Son team, William and Arthur Edelstein discuss one of the dangers of near lightspeed travel in their paper published just last month: Speed kills: Highly relativistic spaceflight would be fatal for passengers and instruments [citation: Edelstein, W. and Edelstein, A. (2012) Speed kills: Highly relativistic spaceflight would be fatal for passengers and instruments.
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In a 2005 paper Craig Williams and crew, from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, improved on their 1998 fusion propelled Outer Planets vehicle – and dubbed it the “Discovery II”, inspired by the fictional “Discovery” from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. The improved version massed 1,690 tonnes fully loaded with propellant, some 861
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Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration SpaceX is proving that spaceflight can be economical, by eschewing corporate bloat and reducing cost with in-house component manufacture. Plus the company has a mission – affordable access to Mars!
If we’re sufficiently patient, M31 is coming towards the Milky Way and should arrive in about 3 billion years or so. Intergalactic Travel is easy, given aeons. However, if we’re talking mere megayears, then the trip to M31 and beyond requires boosting the transit speed. If we can accelerate at a continuous acceleration – undergoing
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Now we have somewhere to go… Image courtesy of Steve Bowers, for the Orion’s Arm shared Universe. Now that we have somewhere to go around Alpha Centauri, with good odds of more clement planets too, then the question of getting there faster becomes more pertinent. In Part 1 I discussed the Mag-Sail equipped Laser-Sail, based
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