[AR] Re: SSTO fuels (was Re: SSTO)
- From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Henry Vanderbilt <hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2018 16:40:06 -0500
On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 11:15:16 -0700 Henry Vanderbilt
<hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I seem to remember an idea that used an ablative material coated
pocket in the underside of the payload and
ground based laser to ablate material in pulses for propulsion.
The late lamented Jerry Pournelle used that in a story back around
1980, IIRC, and the late lamented Jordin Kare looked seriously at
variations on that. Don't know who came up with the idea
originally; it goes back a ways. Jerry might even have heard it
from the Livermore people. Don't know, can't ask him now :(
Not ablative, but:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
The TL;DR is that they want to use a phased array of lasers to propel
a fleet of chip-sized spacecraft towards nearby stars at an
appreciable fraction of the speed of light. I'd think it was science
fiction, only Yuri Milner has been spending money on it, and people
seem to take it seriously. (I don't entirely get how you avoid
vaporizing the nanoship or lots of other things about how this is
supposed to work.)
There was a whole episode of Planetary Radio a while ago devoted to
the topic.
Perry
--
Perry E. Metzger perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Other related posts: