 skwirlinator says: Wow thats 100 million km PLT-powered spacecraft could transit the 100 million km to Mars in less than a week.”I don't think they are joking! Real interplanetary travel possible...cool! When will we get the Warp Drive - now that's I'm looking forward to! not too far off.... we just need to find a quick and easy way to disprove the theory that one can't go faster than the speed of light... that by doing so you would become pure energy... what i want to know, would this be reversible?  could i be converted back to matter before i had even left? If the full scale thruster can push out enough photons for 1g acceleration of a manned craft, that is a _lot_ of photon energy -- quite an exhaust beam. I would not like to be behind it anywhere within a few million miles... even if I were tucked under Earth's atmosphere. The idea of Teleport will no more impossible. well, that's quit interesting!! 8) now let's put that thing in an airplane and see what happens!!!  That's amazing. Now maybe we'll land on Mars in, like, a year or two. Plus we could stick this thing on unmanned spacecraft and shoot them WAY farther than that Voyager one! We could explore other galaxies and stuff. We would need to develop some form of AI because commands would take too long to mean anything We can't accelerate past the speed of light, but we may be able to cross a distance indirectly. Pretty cool, though it will take a while before PLT could be used for interplanetary missions. The demonstrated thrust is in micro newtons, and requires phenomenal precision between the spacecraft, so would only be useful over at most a few kilometers. The net thrust is experienced between the launching and launched spacecraft, so the practical ejecta mass is the launching part that is left behind. If I assume a few orders of magnitude improvement in range and thrust over the current design, I could postulate a 1 Milli newton thrust, and a maximum practical range of 100km. If I take ESA's figures of a ~60 tonne habitat for a manned mars mission, and I assume that the launching platform... Optimism in technology will help this become a reality. I understood what the article was saying and that more R&D would be needed to achieve those speeds. The concept is good and it is a worthwhile foundation. Perhaps we will see something noteworthy befor this century ends but I doubt there will be much practical application this decade or the next. One question.................... How do you stop this thinggg!!!!!! |
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