About that proposed proposition of propulsion that I keep popping off about

12/28/24:  

A study of their propulsion concept looks like a modified version of the 50's Orion concept. The anti-matter would be used to induce a mini-nuke explosion, which would propel the craft to high delta-v with high isp. The isp might be in the range of a half-million of so. This would be sufficient in order to make the solar system much more accessible.

 

The advantage would be in not having to use enriched uranium nor plutonium. Non-critical materials could be used instead. That may make the whole project more palatable to the nervous Nellie crowd.

 

12/26/24:

 

If I am not mistaken, it may well have been possible to develop this tech back in 2007, when this report was written. However, one generation has passed, and it has not been done. There is an opportunity to do it now, but will that opportunity be utilized? After all, there may not be unlimited opportunities. If not this time, it may never be done. That's should sober up some folks, at least. Anyway, what is lacking is the will to do it.  It may well be now or never.

 

12/25/24:

 

Muon-catalyzed fusion propulsion written up previously on the main blog.

 

The fly-in-the-ointment is getting those muons. But you can get all the muons you need if you had anti-matter cheap. Ah, that's the rub. You've got to get the anti-matter. You can make anti-matter in the lab, but that way is too expensive, don't you know. Anti-matter from the Van Allen Belts of Earth would be a lot cheaper, but you need advances in other fields first. One of the those fields is affordable heavy launch. Elon Musk is about to solve that particular problem. There's advances needed in high-temperature super-conductors for the plasma trap envisioned, which would hold the anti-matter together so it won't go "boom". Plus something about that trap has to be invented too.

 

If you can get to that point, you'd have your source of cheap anti-matter. Then you'd need to go to Saturn, where there's gobs of the stuff. Enough to run your spacecraft and about any other thing you can imagine. Plus you can make things go boom.

 

 

The Fly in the Ointment argument against anti-matter propulsion

There's always a "but", isn't there

The stuff you need for this kind of rocket doesn't exist yet. It has to be invented. The fly in the ointment is the chicken and the egg too. If there's no bucks, there's no Buck Rogers.

The problem is that the Luddites have managed to convince us that economic growth is bad. It's called "Limits to Growth". It grew into the so-called environmentalism that has choked off economic growth in the West, and encouraged it to take place in the East.

In other words, the communists did it. We let the commies talk us into sabotaging our own economies. They'll lie about politics being downstream from culture, but amongst themselves they tout the reverse, which is described by Gramscii. Gramscii held that if the commies grabbed all of the high ground of the culture, they can seize the power. And so they have.

The cure is to take it back. But the fly in that particular ointment is that you can vote your way into communism, but you'll have to shoot your way out.

The issue hasn't been decided too much in favor of the commies yet. But they are really close. We have but a few years to turn this around.

Quick and dirty analysis of the anti-matter concept of rocket propulsion

This analysis, if it could be called such, will look at only the potential advantage of this approach. In particular, the economic advantage from the standpoint of the rocket propulsion itself.

 

It should be obvious, and therefore unnecessary to point out just one thing: Any method that could deliver 100 km/sec of delta-v has got to be a big advantage over anything else.

 

For comparison, a Starship Superheavy can deliver 200 tons to low Earth orbit. Therefore, to put 200 tons in low earth orbit is one launch. In order for that same rocket to be refueled for any mission elsewhere would take 10 more launches for the refill. Therefore, each Superheavy launch would cost 11 Superheavy launches to attain 200 tons at Low Earth Orbit, with a capability to go elsewhere.

 

For an anti-matter rocket, assuming you already had the fuel, you could get 100 km/sec. That's a lot more bang for the buck. To make the comparision as fair as possible, assuming that you had the fuel from Earth to refill the Starship, it would take 10 launches from the ground. Each launch from the ground would deliver 1 km/sec of delta-v. Therefore, the anti-matter option is 100 times better.

 

If you take that out to Saturn with that 100 km/sec, which is possible, then you could return with enough anti-matter for 10 more Saturn launches. Therefore, it could be leveraged into a method that would ultimately prove to be 10,000 times better than with a chemical rocket.

 

Even if Starship could bring launches down to a million apiece, it would save 100 billion dollars in launch costs just for one round-trip Saturn anti-matter run. You could make many, many such runs. Therefore, there is no comparison at all with anti-matter. It's a no-brainer. Come to think of it, if one would count the 10 launches to get to orbit, the savings would be a cool $1 trillion for each round trip to Saturn!

Zorin OS problem is a case of bad magic

12/23/24:

 

 

 

 

After attempting a fix that didn't work, I am forced to conclude that the current Zorin OS installation has gone kaputski. May it rest in peace. Or whatever.

 

 

 

 

12/22/24:

 

 

 

 

Trying to trace down this error mess, and this is all I got so far. It is bad magic. Hmm, is there a good magic? Or is it just magic?

If gathering gases from the upper atmosphere doesn't work...

Maybe they could point it towards a spacecraft to get above Low Earth Orbit. The idea here is to get high ISP and high thrust directed at a spacecraft in order to increase useful mass fraction.

It would work on similar principles as the nuclear thermal, but instead of nukes doing the work, a solar thermal solution is employed instead. This would be a variation on the Parkins device.

A solar collector as described in an earlier post would supply the energy. It would focus the energy on an aeroshell, which would get heated up to high temperatures. Liquid hydrogen would be used to keep the aeroshell from melting, and the heated hydrogen would be used as the reaction mass.

An ISP of a thousand seconds would reduce the amount of fuel needed. Compared to a hypergolic engine used in Apollo the mass fraction might well be tripled.

If a fast transit to Mars is desired, then one can post it at a LaGrange point, and have to accelerate the spacecraft to Mars at a high velocity. Perhaps it would get there in 45 days.

The spacecraft could be kept light, so the amount of fuel would needed would not be excessive. However, you'd need to slow down once you got there. Therefore, post another one at one of the Martian moons that would slow down the spacecraft once it got there.

The idea here is really to use the sun as the energy source as opposed to onboard fuel. You'd need a series of "stations" that would boost the spacecraft up from low orbit, and from there to interplanetary destinations. At the destination, you could have a station that would help the craft slow down in the same manner-- a retro rocket type deceleration maneuver.

 

Obama himself said that space has to have an economic basis to it

Hence there has to be an economic rationale for its existence.

Is that possible?

Just carrying forward a bit on my peregrinations on the subject of Lox-Leo.

The latest is about the economics of it. If the economics doesn't make sense, then it won't be done. So how does these economics work?

I'm looking at it in terms of how many launches from the ground that it will make unnecessary. It looks like Starship will need about 10 launches for re-fueling, so that it can go to places beyond low Earth orbit.

If you can reduce that number significantly, then Lox-Leo would at least make more sense that launching from the ground.

Other questions need to be answered though. How much does it take to service these facilities? If it doesn't net out positive, then it doesn't make sense. I don't have some numbers to toss around. There's this one number that might be handy. That number is the number of pounds of thrust that can be generated per MW of beamed energy from GEO. This will determine how much of a facility will be needed to generate the energy.

I think it is 50 pounds per MW. But that could be wrong. If it is correct, let's say that 12k lbs of thrust are needed. I got that number from what the OMS thrusters on the Shuttle needed in order to finish its ascent into orbit. The main engines were good for 98% of orbital velocity. The OMS thrusters had to do the rest.

If memory serves, the Shuttle massed out at 200k lbs. Let's assume that the lox-leo device masses out at that. In order to maintain orbit, you may need 12k lbs of thrust.

To generate 12k of thrust, then you need some multiple of MW of 50 MW increments in order to do the trick. That would be 12000/50 equals 240 MW.

Something less than 1 sq mile of solar panels might do the trick.  You'd have to figure the upkeep of these massive structure in the calculations.  (Not done here.)

It would have to be converted to an energy source to beam to the collecting vessel so as to maintain 12k of thrust for whatever amount of time is needed in order to maintain orbital velocity.

Once you know that, then perhaps you can calculate how much you can collect before having a full tank. This may require even more energy. Indeed, you may even have to count on that. ----12:58 PM, 12/14/24:



7:43 PM:



The 50 MW part is correct, according the source I was thinking about. ( The Nuclear Rocket )

Some reading of this Wikipedia source would seem to indicate that whatever gases found up there may not be what is down at sea level. Hmmm. This may not work like I thought it might. There's a lot of sodium up there!

Instead of space solar on the ground, use it to power other spacecraft from geostationary orbit

 

Consider this space-solar type proposition studied in the late 70's:

 

 

It would consist of a large collector, some 38 sq. miles in area, covered with photovoltaic cells....

 

it would convert solar into microwave power for transmission to rectennas on Earth. The rectennas would re-convert the energy back into electricity that would go into the grid...

 

Such a satellite would mass out at 100,000 tons, and produce 10 Gigawatt of power continuously. It would orbit at a geostationary orbit some 22k miles above earth.

 

 

A few observations here: 1) The collectors are too large. It would take a lot of resources to monitor and service these massive satellites. 2) 10 Gigawatts is a lot of power. That would be the equivalent of several Hoover Dams. 3) 100,000 tons is a lot of mass to lift, even for Starship.

 

You wouldn't need nearly that much power for the atmospheric gas collectors (Lox-Leo). It would not have to be continuous. Energy could be stored and then beamed onward to the spacecraft on an as-needed basis.

 

The Parkins concept posited the use of lead-acid car batteries for powering massive rockets to space from the ground. If that could be achieved, could something that didn't require nearly that much power be used in space instead?

 

 

 

A belated speculation alert for that one.