Jun 10, 2018 05:16 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 10, 2018 06:35 AM by C C.)
https://theoutline.com/post/4884/why-int...-damn-hard
EXCERPT: . . . If you’re wondering why taking a trip to another star is incredibly difficult, blame physics. Conservation of momentum (or Newton’s third law, depending on how you want to look at it) requires a rocket to poop out some amount of mass at some speed (AKA explosive fuel) for the rocket to move. The sticking point is that the fuel still has to push the remaining fuel still unpooped and connected to the payload. This predicament can be turned into a formula that relates the change in speed to the amount of mass pooped out. It’s called the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, named after the father of modern rocket science. It can tell you that if you have a chemical propellant and you’re going to eject your fuel at, say, the maximum velocity of a nuclear fireball — around 100 km/s — and you want to travel 4.25 light-years over to Proxima Centauri, you’re going to need to have ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion times more fuel than payload if you want to get there in around one hundred years. Not to mention that we’d need double the fuel and time to slow down enough to take data from or drop passengers near the star. For a 1 kg payload, the fuel would roughly account for the entire mass of the universe.
The sheer weight of the scientific difficulties facing interstellar travel is humbling, if not existentially depressing. Many space nerds have put their hopes in harnessing exotic engines that utilize badly understood (or entirely misunderstood) physics that might obviate the fuel problem. Two of them, the EmDrive and the Mach Effect Thruster, have been hyped by everyone from NASA to National Geographic as the solutions to our interstellar detention. It’s too early to say if either of them is a pipe dream, but their tantalizing likelihoods fade every day.
The EmDrive has been shrouded in ambiguity ever since it was theorized in an unreviewed 2001 whitepaper by longtime UK aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer. He lays out an argument...
MORE: https://theoutline.com/post/4884/why-int...-damn-hard
- - - Media Bias / Fact Check - - -
The Outline: LEFT BIAS
Factual Reporting: HIGH
~
EXCERPT: . . . If you’re wondering why taking a trip to another star is incredibly difficult, blame physics. Conservation of momentum (or Newton’s third law, depending on how you want to look at it) requires a rocket to poop out some amount of mass at some speed (AKA explosive fuel) for the rocket to move. The sticking point is that the fuel still has to push the remaining fuel still unpooped and connected to the payload. This predicament can be turned into a formula that relates the change in speed to the amount of mass pooped out. It’s called the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, named after the father of modern rocket science. It can tell you that if you have a chemical propellant and you’re going to eject your fuel at, say, the maximum velocity of a nuclear fireball — around 100 km/s — and you want to travel 4.25 light-years over to Proxima Centauri, you’re going to need to have ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion times more fuel than payload if you want to get there in around one hundred years. Not to mention that we’d need double the fuel and time to slow down enough to take data from or drop passengers near the star. For a 1 kg payload, the fuel would roughly account for the entire mass of the universe.
The sheer weight of the scientific difficulties facing interstellar travel is humbling, if not existentially depressing. Many space nerds have put their hopes in harnessing exotic engines that utilize badly understood (or entirely misunderstood) physics that might obviate the fuel problem. Two of them, the EmDrive and the Mach Effect Thruster, have been hyped by everyone from NASA to National Geographic as the solutions to our interstellar detention. It’s too early to say if either of them is a pipe dream, but their tantalizing likelihoods fade every day.
The EmDrive has been shrouded in ambiguity ever since it was theorized in an unreviewed 2001 whitepaper by longtime UK aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer. He lays out an argument...
MORE: https://theoutline.com/post/4884/why-int...-damn-hard
- - - Media Bias / Fact Check - - -
The Outline: LEFT BIAS
Factual Reporting: HIGH
~