If fusion, assisted by magnetic sails, gets us to Alpha Centauri in ~50 years, then how do we get there faster? Absent annihilation drives, powered by gamma-ray lasing matter-antimatter reactions or Hawking decaying force-fed mini-black holes, then we need to get the power-supply off the space vehicle and send fuel, momentum and energy to the

a repost from Facebook. ?”Daedalus” had a top speed of ~0.122c, though some variants could hit 0.138c for an extra 10,000 tonnes of fuel or so. This makes for a 36 year trip to Alpha Centauri – but no way of stopping. Equipping “Daedalus” with a magnetic sail and enough propellant to brake downwards from

After rearranging the mass-models, just for the sake of the exercise (Eric Storm’s suggestion), I’ve computed the fastest time to Alpha Centauri via a Mag-Sail equipped Two-Stage “Daedalus”. In this case both stages will be use to reach the cruise speed, then the mag-sail will be deployed at the appropriate point in the voyage. The

Blogging helps collect one’s thoughts. After the previous post I revisited my presentation and mass-models, only to discover a significant mistake in a key cell reference in Excel. Yikes! Re-writing my equations’s references I managed to shave a significant number of years off the minimum voyage time to Alpha Centauri via a mag-sail equipped “Daedalus”

Something about my mass model of “Daedalus” didn’t sit right with me, so I recomputed the tankage from first principles. The percentages were more like 5%, thus meaning a slightly slower fastest time – 71.58 years with an initial mass of 281,181 tonnes. While “Daedalus” can cruise at 0.12-0.14c, meaning speedy trips to Alpha Centauri,

Currently I am working on a paper & presentation for the 100 YSS Symposium in Houston, to be presented by an Icarus colleague. I am examining the effectiveness of using a magnetic-sail to brake to low-speeds in the target system, but part of that is a comparison with a pure fusion rocket. As it is

The preprint I mentioned is available online (thanks to Brian Wang’s “Next Big Future” post) and it’s here: Affordable, rapid bootstrapping of space industry and solar system civilization More discussion is coming. One preliminary idea is that 100,000 teleoperated robots on the Moon could have a volunteer Army controlling them to help build the Solar

The ISV “Venturestar” is an example of “poly-propulsion”, using a Forward laser-sail to boost to 0.7c, and brake to a halt, in Sol-space, then using matter-antimatter, Powell/Pellegrino “Valkyrie” style, to brake at Alpha Centauri, then boost for the trip home.

No. Not the mountain in the Himalayas. Kardashev II Civilization status – a civilization using the energy output of its star. Earth intercepts just 2.2 billionths of the Sun’s energy and presently we use ~1/10,000th of what Earth receives. Thus the plateau of K-II seems a long way off. However we could boot-strap our way

A pre-print from yesterday, submitted by Branislav Vlahovic: Observed Cosmological Redshifts Support Contracting Accelerating Universe Vlahovic, a Professor at NCCU, discusses the possibility that our Universe is Closed and has already passed its maximum radius, at 15 billion years of age. He explains that the observed red-shift would be observed even in a collapsing space-time