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+--- Thread: Article How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years (/thread-15492.html)
How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years - C C - Feb 23, 2024
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-antimatter-could-work-for-interstellar-travel
EXCERPTS: "Annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy," Weed, cofounder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.
Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It's that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.
[...] An antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft at 1g (9.8 meters per second squared) getting us to Proxima in just five years, Weed said in 2016. That's 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 — one of the fastest spacecraft in history — to travel about half the distance, according to NASA.
[...] The reason we don't have antimatter engines, despite their tremendous capabilities, comes down to cost, not tech.
[...] The basic technology is there. Physicists armed with the world's most powerful particle accelerators have made antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms. The issue is that this type of antimatter is incredibly expensive to make. It's considered the most expensive substance on Earth. Jackson gave us an idea of just how much an antimatter machine would cost to build and maintain.
Jackson is the founder, president, and CEO of Hbar Technologies, which is working on a concept for an antimatter space sail to decelerate spacecraft traveling 1% to 10% the speed of light — a useful design for entering into orbit around a distant star, planet, or moon that you want to study.
Jackson said he's designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter per year.
[...] However, there are other ways to produce antimatter. That's where Weed focused his work.
Positrons "are several thousand times lighter than antiprotons and don't pack quite as much punch when annihilating," Weed said.
The advantage, however, is that they occur naturally and don't need a giant accelerator and billions of dollars to make.
Weed's antimatter propulsion system is designed to use krypton-79 — a form of the element krypton that naturally emits positrons.
The engine system would first gather high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them toward a layer of regular matter, producing annihilation energy. That energy would then trigger a powerful fusion reaction to generate thrust for the spacecraft.
[...] To build Weed's concept at the scale of a starship, "the devil's in the engineering details," Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist and host of "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, told BI.
"We're talking about a device that harnesses truly enormous amounts of energy, requiring exquisite balance and control," Sutter said... (MORE - missing details)