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Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
As you know, with our current technology and resources, it would take many thousands of years to get to Gliese.
Unless you pick up speed perpetually.
Stage One, The Space Craft is propelled from earth by a series of small atomic explosions, preferably anti-matter for the invornment.
Stage 2, once out of Earth Orbit, the nuclear pulse engine saparates from the upper Craft, and the upper craft switches to Ion propulsion.
Stage 3, The craft uses the sun's rotation to steer it in the right direction for it's destination.
Stage four, the ion thrusters saparate from the top of the Craft, which will be traveling for the longest duration of time on the trip there.
Stage 5, The top of the Craft opens into two Micro Wave Transmitters, and inbetween them ejects a light reflecting sail, the microwave emitters blast the Sail, and the weak Ion Thrusters on the bottom of the craft push the craft slightly, canceling out the recoil of the Micro Wave Emitters.
Top Text: Light Reflecting Sail
Middle Text: microwave Transmitters
Bottom Text: 150 year home for Hyper Sleep crew and cargo.
My Questions:
How much would this craft have to weigh.
How many Joults do the atomic explosions need to propel all of the Craft out of Earth Orbit, and what percentage of the Hafnium on Earth is needed to create all of these atomic explosions?
How many Joults do the Ion Thrusters have to produce to propel the Craft to the sun?
What percentage of Helium 3 on the Moon would be needed to fuel the Sail Blasting Micro Waves, and the Micro Wave recoil canceling Ion Thrusters in Stage 5 to produce the right number of Joults to get there?
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moontanman
How large a percentage of C do you see this space craft achieving?
The space craft doesn't achieve near light speeds, what makes it get there so fast is the amalgam of ion propulsion's steady non-stop travel, solar masses sling shotting it, and Gliese 581 moving toward it at great speeds.
I haven't calabrated it yet, but it might get there faster than light would, even though the actual ion propulsion isn't making it move very fast.
__________________ "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
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Using other stars as gravity slingshot is pretty fruitless. Only a small number would have the proper motion to be of any use, and the zig-zag course you would have to take in order to use them would add more time to your trip than you could possibly gain in the slingshots.
You are really over-estimating the efficiency of Ion propulision. Assume that you want to get to Gliese in 1000 years, this means you would have to average 6,000,000 m/s for your velocity. Your top velocity would have to be greater, but let's be conservative and use this as our top velocity. The best ion propulsion system on the drawing boards have a top ISP of 10,000 sec, which works out to an exhaust velocity of 98,000 m/s . Using the rocket equation, we can determine what our mass ratio (ship+fuel)/ship must be to reach the needed velocity. For the given values, this works out to 3.89e26. or IOW, for every kilogram of empty ship mass you would need 65 times the mass of the Earth's worth of fuel.
__________________ "Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feelings for the strength of their argument.
The heated mind resents the chill touch & relentless scruntiny of logic"-W.E. Gladstone
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Janus
Using other stars as gravity slingshot is pretty fruitless. Only a small number would have the proper motion to be of any use, and the zig-zag course you would have to take in order to use them would add more time to your trip than you could possibly gain in the slingshots.
Then I would propuse a new Stage 3, amalgamated with a Stage 4, that together would make it much faster.
Stage 3: The Craft uses the earth's gravity as a sling shot to get to the sun, and then orbits around the sun several times, each time orbiting to a further distance to immitate a super sling shot
Stage 4: The top of the craft ejects a solar sail, and then saperates from the lower end, and the lower end of the craft ejects two super battery canons that can rotate closer to each other in order to avoid the solar sail getting so far away from the battery canons that the light particles don't propel it as fast.
Since the solar battey canons are moving at great speeds from the sun's super sling shot, the light particles have less distance to travel to get to the solar sail, thus, the top of the craft moves even faster. This combined with Gliese orbiting against the craft's flight path, will make the craft get their in under 40 years, seeing as how conventional solar sails move at half the speed of light.
__________________ "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
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardamorg
This combined with Gliese orbiting against the craft's flight path, will make the craft get their many times faster than light.
Nope. Light will always beat you.
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--- "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew." - Marshall McLuhan
"We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it." - Marie Curie
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by freeztar
Nope. Light will always beat you.
The solar sail would be moving at over half the speed of light, now this trip might not be fast, over 20 years, maybe over 40, but it's still under 100, which is why this is our best alternative, and the quickest way to get there.
__________________ "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
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gardamorg
Then I would propuse a new Stage 3, amalgamated with a Stage 4, that together would make it much faster.
Stage 3: The Craft uses the earth's gravity as a sling shot to get to the sun, and then orbits around the sun several times, each time orbiting to a further distance to immitate a super sling shot
That's not how gravity slinghots work.
Quote:
Stage 4: The top of the craft ejects a solar sail, and then saperates from the lower end, and the lower end of the craft ejects two super battery canons that can rotate closer to each other in order to avoid the solar sail getting so far away from the battery canons that the light particles don't propel it as fast.
Since the solar battey canons are moving at great speeds from the sun's super sling shot, the light particles have less distance to travel to get to the solar sail, thus, the top of the craft moves even faster. This combined with Gliese orbiting against the craft's flight path, will make the craft get their in under 40 years,[b] seeing as how conventional solar sails move at half the speed of light.[b]
Where in the world did you ever hear this?
__________________ "Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feelings for the strength of their argument.
The heated mind resents the chill touch & relentless scruntiny of logic"-W.E. Gladstone
Re: Quickest way to get to The Super Earth, will this work?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Janus
That's not how gravity slinghots work.
Where in the world did you ever here this?
Correction, in several years it can reach that speed,
Quote:
How fast does a solar sail go?
The speed of an interplanetary solar sail spacecraft will depend on how long it has been propelled by the pressure of sunlight. The acceleration from sunlight is very small -- approximately five ten-thousandths of a meter per second per second, depending on the size and weight of the sail and the spacecraft. Over one day, that is a velocity increase of 45 meters per second or about 100 miles per hour.
__________________ "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
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