Engineers Propose Interstellar Spacecraft Fueled by Lasers

[drwolf]

well the escapist is not the best source of information, but this looks interesting.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118544-Engineers-Propose-Interstellar-Spacecraft-Fueled-by-Lasers

[an insignificant kerbal]

aww you beat me to it, found this just before...

anyway this is interesting, but havent people been proposing this for a few years now? or has icarus actualy created the machine to do this?

[UmbralRaptor]

I\'m guessing that this was the original article?

It sounds interesting, though I\'m curious as to whether antimatter production would be usefully fast, and if the mass of such equipment would be be less than the extra(?) antimatter for a round trip with a Valkyrie-style rocket. Or if the overall mass is expected to be low enough that they\'d use more or less the same design?

[Phoenix Aerospace]

Someone else who knows about the Valkyrie? The >92% c. Valkyrie? Pellegrino may be a bit of a nutjob considering his non-existent degree, but he\'s a genius all the same.

[DeviouslyDeviant]

*builds ship* IM A CHARGIN\' Ma LAZER!!! *lands on Kerbin* YAYAYAYAY!!! 8) 8)

[TouhouTorpedo]

Honestly thought this would be utter codswallop at first. But I\'m an engineer who only has experience in classic physics, so I wouldn\'t really know much about these 'weird' effects.

The original Deadalus system Icarus is based off of wasn\'t designed to come back from the target system, and could still do the job in 50 years, fueled primarily with helium-3 fusion (as it produces a higher specific impulse due to the lack of free neutrons escaping and wasting energy) its also actually the source of the helium-3 craze, which I found out from one of the original designers of Daedalus.

I\'m not sold on the using this method to fuel up part though. It would make sense to make fuel as you go this way and reduce the mass carried, but if its collected in situ there has to be more mass effecient ways of harvesting the fuel required.

Aside from that, this very advanced piece of qauntum mechanics based machinery still has to actually start after being dormant for 50 years.

Better off trying to aerobrake and ramscoop the upper atmosphere of a gas giant I think personally.

[OdinYggd]

What I want to see is a practical demonstration of using a laser pulse to generate matter-antimatter pairs. Because it sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me, they need practical numbers of the efficiency of that method of generation in order to figure out how long it will take to refuel for a given solar panel area for instance.

Currently the only method of generating antimatter that I know of relies on using a particle accelerator to blast a heavy metal target with electrons, in the process kicking up clumps of positrons that can be identified by their flipped spiral in the magnetic fields of the accelerator chamber. That method requires gigawatts of energy for perhaps a few individual particles yield, nowhere near the amount of energy said antimatter will give back.

Though this approach does have the advantage of possibly creating fuel while in space without having to cart about raw materials, which is a big plus that was also seen in the Bussard Ramjet concepts of a decade ago.