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What will the future of space faring entail. Will it be with great star-ships and vessels as often depicted in popular culture, or poop lined rocket capsules. I hope it is the former to be quite honest. Now I realize the difficulties with our current space travel capabilities (weight, fuel restrictions, etc) but if we were to over come these, especially decreasing our current cost of moving tonnage into space, we would be able to traverse at least our solar system quite easily.
Other star systems and galaxies pose new challenges (warp drive, faster than light travel and time dilation to name a few.) May the discussion commence.
Last edited by jayhopethismeeturstandard; 03-16-2013 at 12:17 AM..
What will the future of space faring entail. Will it be with great star-ships and vessels as often depicted in popular culture, or poop lined rocket capsules. I hope it is the former to be quite honest. Now I realize the difficulties with our current space travel capabilities (weight, fuel restrictions, etc) but if we were to over come these, especially decreasing our current cost of moving tonnage into space, we would be able to traverse at least our solar system quite easily.
Other star systems and galaxies pose new challenges (warp drive, faster than light travel and time dilation to name a few.) May the discussion commence.
popular science just did an great article on this very subject in their recent issue but it says Fusion powered engines that used plasma to propel it are possible in theory 30 years from now and warp drive is a 100 year get into space program that will see the commercial and governments go farther and make it cheaper and build the stepping stones to get us beyond our solar system
It is the push to get us to explore another nearby ones that could gives us the chance to go check out some of those earth like planets nearby and send a probe out to check out the area band maybe we might get lucky with a planet that is a fixer upper
Maybe with a little terraforming that we will learn from one day colonizing mars used on it we could be on to seek out new life and new Civilisations to go boldly where no one has gone before and look for a new home instead of a house we are looking at suitable planets and based on the cost distance and how much work it needs maybe move out to another solar system and have a species that will not be doomed when the sun goes red dwarf and makes earth a place that will way to hot to any advanced life exist on it.
I mean a space elevator made of carbon nanotubes would be the best way using near future technology to get the price per ton up into space down to a level that it is possible for more people of average incomes to go spend a holiday in space someday that it becomes like Air travel is today where planes fly all over the world to destinations that a century ago would take days or weeks steaming across the oceans shipping routes and even then titanic sunk just over a century ago and it was the high of the industrial revolution and when it went down it ended that era since WWW1 and the wright brothers brought air travel to be useful and could serve many applications and it changed the way we travel but even in modern times we seem to have issues with cruise ships and modern ships are a rather mature technology that has not changed much.
so who knows we could have another break through and end up with a warp drive and maybe find an alternative that we never thought of before while we get more into space and develop the technology that will get us up there and beyond this solar system but chances we will la the foundation and the next few generations will be the ones that find out if it works or how to solve problems with something so advanced that that does not exist yet.
we have a long way to go before we get there and we will have some failures and setbacks but if we want to get out there we can do it but we have to really be motivated to do it.
My car ended up with a warp drive, and it shakes uncontrollably over 20 mph.
well might need a alignment since that is not good at all plus still traveling faster than light means better hope we have computers that can pick up dust and space debris or flying into a asteroid sucks for our slow craft of today and we cannot really be able to manually fly the thing at those speeds messes up the space ships aliment and from light speed to-0 is a bad accident.
I thought it was a lost cause but I knew there were minds on my wavelength.
So here are some technologies that have the ability to change space faring forever.
Nuclear Space Drill; Who ever said space is a vast abyss clearly can’t see past Neptune, but we can, and when we do we see bodies like the asteroid belt called the Oort Cloud. If you propel a craft near any substantial fraction of the speed of light or beyond you will undoubtedly face (as GTOlover pointed out) the reality of particulate interference from undetectable celestial bodies during sustained space flight and the resulting kinetic energy will destroy a space craft instantly. Thus if we desire interstellar space travel we have to overcome being blow up by little rocks as trying to traverse light-years of space while constantly deviating course to dodge bodies that enter our trajectory would be a dubious task at best.
I digress to matters closer to Earth when attempting to solve this quandary. When our engineers are drilling tunnels or roadways and subway systems, there exists a method of nuclear drilling that melts and fuses rock to the surround walls and in effect creates a solidified tunnel around the drill. Now, with a little design variation, we can apply this principal to space craft in their efforts of travel. Since “drilling” in space with a nuclear tipped ship would be much easier than drilling through a solidified mass in addition to the kinetic energy of a near light or faster than light ship, great speeds could still be achieved. United States Patent: 3693731
Rail Guns; Tired of rocketry; me too. Carl Sagan taught me that to build a rocket that could travel to another solar system would require more mass then is in the known universe. Nuclear fuel has been discussed in fission/fusion reactor engines but the technology has not arrived yet and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty technically prohibits it. Thus enters the Railgun. Using only electricity we can fire projectiles in theory to the speed of light and beyond (electrical current is only limited by resistance thus the more power we ascertain for a propulsion rail the faster the craft will go.) However stopping such a craft would pose a significant challenge since friction is near non-existent in space. Perhaps an opposite rail at the destination point could decelerate the craft; yet lining one rail up with another in the vast distances of space will be complex to say the least, especially with celestial bodies constantly moving. Navy's New Railgun Shoots at Mach 7, Can Hit Targets 100 Miles Away : 80beats
Time Dilation; Traveling great distances at the moment would require traveling at a great percentage of the speed of light. The nearest system to ours is 4.37 light years away so a 5 year+ mission can be expected even with near light speeds. At 99% of the speed of light, time dilates at a ratio of 7 to 1 or 7 earth years to one flight year, at 99.9 its 22 to 1 and 99.99 its 70 to 1. Thus if we want to overcome the obvious discrepancies that long distance space journeys pose, we either need to go about 90% the speed of light (TD ratio is 2/1) or less, which will increase travel time to other systems, or will have to overcome these time dilation issues.
Unless you want to return to earth a few decades in the future…
Space travel going that fast may never be feasible or realistic. We need to find a shortcut somehow/somewhere. Going even 1% the speed of light would seem way to hard to avoid even the smallest of particle from ripping apart the spacecraft. You would have to map where you were going and where everything would be at during your travel before you started to just avoid hitting it.
The most efficient form of energy is anti-matter, the amount of energy released is E=mc^2. Hydrogen fusion is the second most efficient form of energy, releasing E=0.008mc^2. If we could harness that energy, without any loss (which of course there will be), it would only require 1.69 kilograms of anti-matter to continually accelerate/decelerate round-trip to Mars for a 100 kiloton spacecraft traveling at 1 G (9.8 m/s^2). It would require 212 kilograms of hydrogen to make the same trip using fusion. It could also make the round trip to Mars in 4 days and 3 hours, reaching 0.29% the speed of light.
Being able to travel at one gravity the entire distance has a lot of advantages. Primarily, the astronauts would enjoy Earth's gravity during the entire trip, thus eliminating the problem with bone and muscle loss as a result of zero gravity. It would also allow us to travel to Neptune in 15 days , 10 hours; Jupiter in 5 days, 20 hours; and the Moon in 3.5 hours.
However, to get anywhere outside of our solar system we will need something much faster. Even using anti-matter, it would require 4.38 kilograms of fuel to move 1 kilogram to Proxima Centauri (4.24 light years away) moving at 1 G continuously. Which means it cannot be done. If you slow down to 0.2 G continuous thrust, it would require 0.875 kilograms of anti-matter to move 1 kilogram the 4.24 light years, and take 10 years from Earth's perspective.
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