Reaching for Interstellar Flight

When Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise hit the television screen in 1966, the science fiction series had trouble finding its own space and time slot.

Decades later, a similar visionary zeal to seek new worlds and new civilizations is a factual enterprise for a new generation of galactic explorers. They are taking on spacetime and hoping to boldly go where no spacecraft has gone before -- out to far-flung stars and the planets that circle them.

I found this to be very interesting:

Given time and hard work, propellantless space travel, or even more exotic propulsion systems might open up the Universe to human exploration, said Paul March of Lockheed Martin Space Operations in Houston, Texas.

*snip*

"If we are lucky?very, very lucky, we might have a solution to the propellantless propulsion side of this interstellar propulsion problem within the next ten years," March said.

www.space.com...

The whole article is a fascinating read. I didn't even know that some are considering antimatter powered engines as "the engines of choice" for interstellar traveling. I've always thought that fusion power would be the answer.

EDIT: Almost forgot, space.com also had another very interesting article on interstellar travel. It focuses more on the powersources:

As the 21st century unfolds, radically different forms of air and space vehicles will replace the clunky machines of today, whisking passengers at ultra-high speed around the Earth and outward into space.

Laboratories scattered around the world are delving into novel and exotic forms of propulsion. Breakthrough physics could well make possible ambitious human treks across interstellar distances.

Work is underway to harness antimatter as a way to shave travel time to the Moon down to minutes, or between Earth and Mars to a day. Meanwhile, laser and microwave technology is rapidly advancing the idea of beaming people and payloads effortlessly into Earth orbit, making fuel-guzzling rocketry look like the horse and buggy of yesteryear.

www.space.com...

[Edited on 17-12-2003 by Paradigm]

i think they already solved the problem of propellantless propulsion...

anti-gravity research was classifeied in the late 1940's

for those 60 years I think the government has come up with a solution...

Interesting Russian, that would be one of, if not the biggest achievement in science. I'd like to know why you assume this.

[Edited on 17-12-2003 by Kano]

Originally posted by Kano
Interesting Russian, that would be one of, if not the biggest achievement in science. I'd like to know why you assume this.

[Edited on 17-12-2003 by Kano]

Kano i would suggest you read...

"The Hunt For Zero Point"

By Nick Cook...

he is also the writer for Jane's Defence Weekly...

I will answer youer question later...

got to go to work...

Originally posted by Russian
i think they already solved the problem of propellantless propulsion...

anti-gravity research was classifeied in the late 1940's

for those 60 years I think the government has come up with a solution...

That's a pretty big if. What I dont get is that if the US goverment had solid, working anti-grav tech, why would they hide it? And why would they spend billions of dollars on fighters & bombers that would be obsolete as soon as they roll out the first model?

[Edited on 17-12-2003 by Paradigm]

Originally posted by Paradigm
What I dont get is that if the US goverment had solid, working anti-grav tech, why would they hide it? And why would they spend billions of dollars on fighters & bombers that would be obsolete as soon as they roll out the first model?
[Edited on 17-12-2003 by Paradigm]

I would venture a guess here and offer this answer to Paradigm:
The reason could possibly be 2 or 3-fold...

1) Military #1 - If the "other guys" do not have this technology then why allow something so radical and potentially valuable to the military (aka National interests) into the public sector where potential opponents could have access to it?

2) Military #2 - In various essays and publications concerning anti-gravity technology and it's potential uses for national defense one thing becomes clear - there are potential spin-off technologies that could be a far worse problem than nuclear proliferation is today.

Just one example could be the following scenario - It stands to reason that if anti-gravity could force something up away from the earth's gravitational field then it could potentially do just the opposite and exert even more gravitational force downward toward the earth.
Perhaps such a gravitational manipulation could be the process by which a crop circle is made. But take it a step further, instead of pressing an acre of wheat down to the ground in a particular pattern, what if you could exert even more force down on a person, building, aircraft carrier, large metropolitan area or even a siesmic fault line? The weapon applications could be immense and involve mass destruction never seen before with no adverse (radioactivity) complications.

3) Economic - The Aerospace industry is currently enjoying a dominance in the western economies - many people in powerful places have great amounts of money tied up in this industry and to have things change drastically could destablize the investments of these industrialist and politicians.

Now for my disclaimer... I'm not saying that this is indeed the case but I would venture a guess and say these are potential answers to your question~




[Edited on 17-12-2003 by intelgurl]

A very nice post, Intelgurl. I hadn't thought about anti-grav being used in the way you mentioned.

And as for options #1 and #3, I still think the benefits of bringing the tech into the public domain would outweigh the negatives. I see where you're coming from, though. Every new revolutionizing technology is a possible double edged sword.

I think that there are 2 ways for us to make interstellar travels:
1.almost-light-speed travel. It makes a time anomaly because crew of spaceship will not age normally but much slower (for example a 10 years travel will age the crew for 3 weeks)
2. artifical wormholes creation. This is a way for easy and INSTANT interstellar travel

I tend to lean in the direction of of gravity drive as the answer as well. Quite possibly the secrets of gravity have been uncovered allowing the control, vectoring, or creation of gravity at will. If this is the case and that part of the problem has been solved, the next problem would be the support technology to support it. One such problem would be that if this were possible, the unimiginable speeds that could be reached would require some type of tech that could see even the smallest of particles and debris in the path of the craft from an extremely huge distance. I would think that collision avoidance would be the single greatest hurdle of a craft with the speed of intersteller travel. This would also support the reason of if the goverment and their contractors have it, why they are keeping it secret. If the tech was developed by someone else they would suddenly be the most powerful and influental instuition in the world.