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Re: Present day and future antimatter factories, according to Robert Forward
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Originally Posted by CraigD
According to Robert Forward’s 1995 IMHO classic popular science book “Indistinguishable from Magic”, antimatter factories are about 0.000003% (1 in 60 million) efficient. Including the cost of the factory and its operation, the present cost of antimatter at about ten trillion dollars per milligram. The present production rate of antimatter is about  (one trillionth of a gram per day). In the same chapter/essay (chapter 1), he cites a study he did for the US Air Force concluding that, if a factory were designed carefully to maximize production (present day factories are based on accelerator/collectors designed to provide the maximize useful scientific data), the efficiency for on-grid, Earth-based factories could be improved to about 0.01% (1 in 10 thousand). The resulting cost is about ten million dollars per milligram, though production rate would still be too low to meet present day spaceflight demand. Still, assuming a first-generation antimatter powered water steam rocket, such a cost would be about 1/10th the cost of current chemical rockets for routine tasks such as orbiting satellites and sending spacecraft to other planets.
To produce antimatter at sufficient rates for routine space travel, production would need to be on the order of 1 g/day. According to Forward, this would require space-based factories with the equivalent of a present-day photovoltaic panel 100 km by 100 km at 1 Earth’s orbit (AU) distant from the Sun (which would equate to about 1/7th the area at a distance of about 0.38 AUs, just inside the orbit of Mercury.
My views on the subject are pretty close to Forward’s. |
The stations would be destroyed by mass coronal ejections, you don't put something that close to the sun and expect it to survive, unless you could build it really strong, and if it weren't made of photovoltaic material, than it wouldn't work.
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"We believed the world would not be the same, a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent, I remembered a line from the Hindu scripture, the bagavagita, Vishnu was trying to convince the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, Now I have become death, destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another"
-Robert J Oppenheimer, The atomic bomb
Last edited by Gardamorg; 10-18-2008 at 11:09 AM..
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