Space Ships? No, Space Chips...

A fellow named Mason Peck out of Cornell has some nifty ideas and one of them is "Lorentz-Actuated Orbits: Electrodynamic Propulsion without a Tether" or a "chip" as space vehicle. A Cornell Profile of Peck. His website. A PDF Overview of his Phase 1 NIAC funded research. A PDF link to the Phase 1 final report. And a link to Phase 2 Overview.

In some ways this concept would seem to make sense and maybe less so in others. I never really thought of chips as their own engine before. Learn something new every day.

Cheers,

Vic

[edit on 7-8-2007 by V Kaminski]

Very Very interesting..I remember this one woman physicist had many years ago proposed surfing along the gravity wells of planets and had mapped out routes in our solar sytem. This sounds just like the type of thing ETS would use for propulsion and navigation. We really are like Bradbury said,,the Martians. Nice work.

SyS