VIRTUAL SAIL: The electric solar wind sail, or e-sail, concept offers the opportunity to field truly enormous virtual sails as much as 40 kilometers across, possibly enabling the development of the fastest man-made objects ever flown—perhaps at speeds around 50 kilometers per second, Janhunen says.
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It takes large quantities of rocket fuel to power space probes through the cosmos. So much so that many long-range missions, including exploratory voyages to the outer planets and beyond, are typically impractical or too time-consuming to contemplate carrying out using conventional rocket motors. To address the problem, scientists have developed ingenious alternative propulsion systems such as ion-drive technologies that require much less propellant than standard chemical rockets but, nonetheless, travel much faster over time. But even ion thrusters have limitations.
What if spacecraft could traverse our solar system or even interstellar space at yet greater velocities using no propellants at all? Such is the allure of solar sails—large, ultrathin mirrors that harness the faint pressure of the sun's reflected light to move through the vacuum of space. It is no wonder then that engineers at NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are now flight-testing prototypes of these photon-propelled solar sails—dubbed, respectively, NanoSail-D and IKAROS.
Although these pioneering craft garnered headlines when they were deployed in 2010, a different solar sail concept is also currently in the works, one that replaces physical sails with mostly nonmaterial shrouds comprising electric fields emanating from long, lightweight wires that extend outward like umbrella stays. And because the electric solar wind sail, or e-sail, concept offers the opportunity to field truly enormous virtual sails as much as 40 kilometers across, it could enable the development of the fastest man-made objects ever flown—perhaps at speeds around 50 kilometers per second, says its chief inventor, Pekka Janhunen, a research manager at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki.
E-sails differ from photon solar sails in that they catch the solar wind rather than sunlight, Janhunen explains. The solar wind is a high-speed but extremely tenuous stream of electrically charged gases—ionized hydrogen and helium—that flow outward from the sun. And although that ion stream exerts a dynamic pressure that is some 5,000 times smaller than that produced by solar photons, each charged wire produces a cylindrical field that can be as large as 100 meters in diameter, which makes for an effective sail area that is as much as a million times bigger. "That's the trick behind the e-sail's efficiency," he says. "When you switch from physical to electric sails, you lose a [pressure] factor of 5,000 but gain a[n area] factor of a million."
Janhunen is leading a three-year, $3.25-million project (partially funded by the European Union) to demonstrate the fundamental e-sail concept, first on Estonia's upcoming EstCube 1 nanosatellite and then on the Finland's Aalto 1 nanosat. Each tiny satellite is to simulate the basic interaction between an electric field and surrounding charged particles by unreeling a short, high-voltage wire tether into the plasma of Earth's ionosphere to measure any electrostatic forces that develop, Janhunen says. This simple setup will simultaneously demonstrate what engineers call a plasma brake—a device that could someday be attached to orbital debris and space junk such as old satellites and spent rocket stages to create drag to slow them down, thus increasing their rates of orbital decay, hastening reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
If those tests are successful, the eventual plan is to fly an e-sail craft that will unfurl a circular array of up to 100 20-kilometer-long conductive filaments only 25 microns thick, Janhunen says. The e-sail craft would then spin to deploy a giant structure of centrifugally stretched wires that resembles the spokes of a wheel. When high voltage (supplied by photovoltaic panels) is applied to the conductive filaments, overlapping electrical fields would form that serve as a barrier to the charged particles in the oncoming solar wind. The e-sail would thus catch the solar wind like some huge dandelion seed that is blown aloft by terrestrial breezes.
Tilting the array's plane to the oncoming flow will allow the novel spacecraft to tack and change trajectory while cruising either toward or away from the sun, he notes. Although payloads will probably be limited in weight so as not to overtax the virtual shrouds, the electro-sail's potential applications might also include: serving as a brake for interplanetary probes as they approach their targets; as propulsion for nine-month, inward-spiraling expeditions to study Mercury or the sun up close; round-trip sample missions to asteroids; or even journeys beyond the solar system and into interstellar space.
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55 Comments
Add CommentI was curious to put these speeds in perspective:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisE-sail = up to 180,000 km/hr
Apollo 11 = about 10,000 km/hr average
Voyager 1 = ~62,000 km/hr
New Horizons (probe to pluto) = about 50,000 km/hr when passes pluto
How would you keep the wires rigid enough that they would not collapse under the pressure of the solar wind?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe dimensions are so great that space debris will wreck it in no time flat. Since it is unworkable, Nasa will fund it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey said they plan to spin it. The tension will keep them spread. It may be tricky to do tacking. They would have to apply rotating differential voltages in different parts of the sail, as it rotates, to turn it. I suspect that they'd have to limit the degree of tilt to avoid instability.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you even reading the article, or just making a pithy remark in the hopes that someone will find you amusing? (current count is zero by the way). If you had been reading you would have seen that the filaments are 25 microns wide (to put that in perspective, a human hair is between 40 and 120 microns wide). So the chance of run-in with space debris is probably fairly small. The electrical field generated by the filaments is what captures the electrical charge (not much chance of space debris puncturing an electrical charge)and theoretically propels the craft.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it (this article) shows a real progression in the field of propulsion.
My question is what effect will weight have on the rate of acceleration?
could you break it down in a travel example (i.e. conventional trip to mars takes 500 days, with sail it would take XYZ)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNever mind, i googled it. A trip from earth to Mars at the closest distance (35,000,000 miles) at 180,000 kph would take about 360 hours +/-. That's pretty ninja!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, we will see about the small chance of being destroyed by space debris, if we ever get it off the ground. Let us know, what you invented.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI discovered gravity control and patented it. It was offered to Nasa in 1980. The Propulsion Engineers did not like it. They experimented with it after the second Space Disaster and caused the Big Black-out in 2003 when they forgot to ask me for advice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLook at: > www.rexresearch.com/hiddink/hiddink.htm
Performance:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisF=MA. Force falls off as you move farther from the sun, approximately as 1/X^2. You get the full velocity claimed by maneuvering around the sun and going out of the solar system. For most real uses, it will be much lower. It is, like solar sails, a low acceleration system.
Unlike solar sails, it could provide very low push in some extrasolar regions. Magnetic fields there move free ions.
Probably not enough to make this a workable interstellar drive.
There are also magnetic versions on the drawing boards. These concepts are not new, and have been proposed for over 30 years. Still, this may be the second to progress to a working prototype. Solar sails were first.
An interesting concept, but I do not see how you can "tack" towards a star, there is no purchase in space as there is when sailing with a keelboat, and why spin the array? The motive particles are so extremely fast that mechanical movement would be as if it were standing still. Project Ikarus? He failed!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure---just a few small details to work out. Just send lots of money--never ask where it is going--and wait for a very long time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisright, maybe you'd like us to give the money to the poor, suffering oil companies in the form of more tax breaks. Or, better yet, lets de-fund all science everywhere, triple the Pentagons budget, invade North Korea and Iran, then print lots and lots of bibles.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMuch better use of our tax dollars than driving technological innovation.
I hope I raised your cortisol levels.
The popular magnetic based implementation is called the "Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion" or M2P2 for short. It basically creates a plasma out of a gas and blows a giant magnetic bubble on which the solar wind pushes. The magnetic field is many time greater that the Earth field strength and the amount of gas is far less because it is not being used like propellant and expelled it is held in the magnetic field like the surface of a balloon and only needs to be replenished to keep it intact. For interstellar missions it would have to travel in a solar orbiting to pick up the speed needed to reach the solar escape velocity; once in interstellar space it wouldn't have any significant additional velocity added but once it reached its target it would use the same magnetic plasma balloon to slow the craft down to slower speeds. In any case this is all really cool stuff.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the filaments were stationary, there would be little probability of interaction with space debris. However, since they will be deployed and given stability by the centrifugal force of rotation, this greatly increases the probability of interaction with space debris. Plus, the article states that 100 of these filaments are planned. That is an angular separation of only 3.6 degrees. When that array starts to rotate, it will appear more and more "solid" to any chunk of debris that passes through it. As a result, I believe that this design is unworkable as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSir,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm very much happy to be a member to such a journal. It is my correct user name registered to SA.
Thanks
Suresh P
I understand your feelings. Having invented a teleportation device that would make rocket technology obsolete and seeing the idea thouroughly dismissed by every engineer and research instution that I have offered to give it to for free I have been very frustrated. I think it's the executives at very powerful corporations that have blacklisted me because such a technological wonder would ruin their profits.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think this is a great idea. In interstellar space the some kind of field could be used to collect the free hydrogen for use in an ion drive. the energy for that would have to come from a nuclear thermoelectic generator, though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat a fantastic concept. Perhaps future genarations of the prototypes we may build soon may be used to propel heavier payloads like people. Maybe it could also be used to shield it's occupents from cosmic rays.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUnfortunately for the original form of the M2P2 concept the coupling between Solar Wind and sail plasma wasn't worked out with the right plasma physics - the original sail won't work. The Japanese are researching plasma sails still, with some encouraging results using real physical models, but it's still early days to tell if it will work better than a plasma rocket. Unlike Pekka's e-sail, which will work as advertised.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is still way too slow for interstellar travel. You still need many other techniques to get to a fraction of light speed. The time to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centuri at 4.128 ly is 25,308 years at 180,000kph, a little beyond practicality. (This is even slower than a US postal worker who tried to walk the mail around the equator).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJim, there is no limit to speed. The Gravity Control system that could have been applied to the Shuttles would have reached the ISS in one hour, the Moon in a couple of hours and Mars within one day. All that could have been accomplished if a constant acceleration of only ONE G/sec was used. The crew would have had all the time the same gravity as if they were standing or sitting on earth. When they were lying down, the acceleration could have been sped up many times.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is possible that the technology, used by the Flying Saucers, would allow speeds to reach the Orion Cluster
in a few weeks. The force-field that would be accomplished by the technology would protect the craft and crew from collsions with space-debris and radiation.
To save $50 million (my fee) Nasa decided to commit suicide by sticking to obsolete rockets costing One to Ten Billion Dollar each, while the Russians and Chinese are working together to build a real Space Craft.
Nasa Engineers do not know, that there are no tank stations in space. The Russian/Chinese effort will use a small nuclear reactor for power.
My system would have tapped energy out of the aether. like Tesla (probably) did to power his Pierce Arrow Car in 1931.
Wow, ennui, you are a real genius. It is unfortunate that you are so greedy that you will not provide your amazing technology to the world for free. Imagine how much Super Amazing Gravity Control could change our lives! I mean, the Orion Cluster in a few weeks!?!? That's faster than the speed of light! How could you be so selfish! Maybe instead of trying to sell your idea to NASA, you should build a prototype yourself, fly to the Orion Cluster, and bring back the Magical Secret Alchemical Device of Glox. Then you could start converting cow manure into diamonds and end poverty and war forever!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour Gravity Control system is science fiction because aether does not exist. It was disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 and by Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReaching the Orion Cluster in a few weeks is theoretically possible if you could travel close to the speed of light because of time dilation. But of course this is practically impossible with current technology.
Apollo 11 reached at least 40,000 kph (escape velocity).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisE-sail will not be the fastest spacecraft at 180,000 kph. Helios 1 is and will remain the fastest spacecraft. It reached over 250,000 kph in 1974.
Well Pseudo Scikilla and Strangelove:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBe sure that you tell that to any ET's that Gravity control does not exist. A Flying Saucer still comes off the ground.
Tesla tapped energy out of the aether to power his Pierce Arrow Car in 1931.
Dr. Kahn of the Hudson Institute told my Patent Lawyer that they had evaluated my invention at $600 Billion, if the USA would have it before Russia. (The Cold War was still on).
Look at >One Terminal Capacitor< and
>www. rexresearch.com/hiddink/hiddink.htm<
Yes but it will take much more than 360 hours to accelerate to 50 Km/sec and you have to accelerate out and decelerate once there. Still a very interesting concept. I didn't see any figures in the article like newton/m**2 that could give us a clue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo prove your claim, you have to bring ET or flying saucer or Tesla's Pierce Arrow or your invention to the media for demonstration. Otherwise, it's all moonshine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSadly, if it weren't for just a few articles, I would remove SA from my favorites list. This site seems to get progressively worse every month. Loons, nuts, trolls, and just plain vitriol make reading the comments painful and forgettable. A few years back this was still a scientific magazine. Lately, the quality of the articles has trended down, surpassed only by the downward spiral of the comments. There are many other scientific sites which are still into science, but I will not mention them here, fearing some of this infection might infest them also. Sad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore on speed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRussia's Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to reach escape velocity (40,000 kph) in 1959. Luna 2 went to the moon 10 yrs before Apollo 11.
We all know Chuck Yeager's X-1 rocket plane was the first to go supersonic in 1947. That's not true.
Goddard's A-5 rocket went supersonic in 1935. Von Braun's V-2 rocket flew at Mach 5.4 in 1942.
No, I never heard a claim that Chuck Yeager's X-1 was the first to go supersonic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, I have heard the claim that Mr. Yeager was the first MAN to go supersonic - which is a big difference. (Even that has been the subject of some dispute).
Unfortunately, Postman1, I have to agree with you. Scientific American used to be a great magazine. It has gone way downhill, becoming more of an opinion rag than a science magazine. Fortunately, I've found Science News to be much better on hard science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd yes, the level of comments has degraded here, also. Unfortunately, that's what you get on the Internet.
Eric, your logic is incorrect in two respects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all, the sail covers exactly as much area whether it is spinning or at rest. Spinning the wires does not increase their size.
It does, to a slight extent, increase the area they cover over a period of time. This would be real important if space debris were moving very slowly. However, the debris moves at such a high relative speed that the sail might as well be stationary.
A good example of this is taking a picture of a moving object. If the camera's shutter is slow with respect to the object's movement, the picture is blurry. However, if the shutter speed is high relative to the object's movement, the object seems to be standing still.
The other error in your calculation has to do with "only 3.6 degrees". Sure, that's a small amount - but at full extension (20 km radius), the wires are around 1255 meters apart. In fact, the physical aspects (wires) of such a sail would only cover around 50 sq. meters, while the electrical aspects would cover over 1.25 billion square meters - so the wires cover something less than 1/25,000,000 of the total area of the sail.
I doubt there is going to be much trouble with space debris.
Yes, Jerry, Science News is one of the sites I was referring to. In fact, that is where I just was. So far, they don't seem to have a political agenda, a la SA. There are other sites, but I hesitate to point them out here. For the time being, I suppose I will continue to check back here on occasion and read articles, but with a rather large grain of salt. Sad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes I know. I'm just perplexed with all the fuss about "Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier." As if he proved that supersonic flight was possible when in fact V-2 rockets were routinely hitting Mach 4 in 1944.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe it would be better if it could be powered by fusion energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://tinyurl.com/nuclear-fusion-starship
I am interested in the tacking and the deceleration problems as relate to actually trying to travel from Earth to somewhere like Jupiter in the shortest time. What would be really cool is if an electric, photonic, or a magnetic sail could at the flip of a switch change from being acted on repulsively by photons, solar wind, or magnetic fields, to being acted on attractively.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am trying to figure out a belt and suspenders approach that would utilize a combination of sail methods based on the same physical sail gridwork to facilitate maneuvers and especially to allow deceleration.
With deceleration you really cut transit times because you can run at your top achievable velocity for a longer period before you have to put on the brakes to dock at your destination.
I also have an aerospace patent floating around out there in the meme-o-sphere waiting for a favorable investment capital wind.
mike@37...I think you kind of answered the question I had about this article....using this field to slow the craft down...(change the polarity from positive to negative)...I still think the deceleration would be much slower than the acceleration..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisE-sail is a fantastic idea. Two problems though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne, you need to charge the wire to make e-sail work. Where do you get energy to charge the wire? The article said photovoltaic panels. So e-sail got rid of the physical solar sail but you need solar panels. If you're going to use solar panels to power your e-sail, wouldn't it be more efficient to use it to generate electrostatic field in an ion rocket? You don't need 2,000 km of wire of additional mass to accelerate.
Two, you need to spin the wire to generate magnetic field. You need continuous energy input to keep it spinning. Inertia is enough in perfectly vacuum space but solar wind provides drag. So the solar wind that gives thrust also gives drag. Can you get more thrust than drag? You might just succeed in making a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. You get more energy output than energy input.
It seems to me that tacking requires the deflection of mass. How a system that only absorbs tack?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeager's X-1 rocket was the first "aircraft" to to supersonic. The difference between an aircraft and a rocket being that an aircraft uses aerodynamics to sustain lift instead of the thrust from the rockets.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso the XP-86 was probably the first true aircraft to reach supersonic speeds but that was in a dive not in controlled level flight. As well, it wasn't until about a month after Yeagar's flight that the speed of the XP-86 was reliably recorded at about mach 1.02.
I am always fascinated by the sail powered ice skimmers that come out on the Great Lakes when ice conditions are just right. These miraculous but simple little hulls with steel runners are capable of speeding to 80 mph in a 20 mph wind. Further, the acceleration involved is neck snapping when they tack and the sail catches the wind just right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe aerodynamics involved illustrate that the wind is not merely "pushing" the sail. What is happening is that the sail profile is harvesting energy from the body of the wind and then converting that energy into a velocity considerably greater than the wind speed itself through some tricky geometric mechanics.
I have always wondered if there is a way to do that with force fields or solar wind? It wouldn't seem that we could do it with photonic pressure because that would end up with the sail exceeding the speed of light.
That is not good at all for space travel.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyou need to build in a magnetic field that can rip you 1 million times faster then that.
just like a MIR scanner, it pull metal to it real fast, with a small 10,000 gauss magnetic field. but we can make split second millions of gauss fields, & German scientist just made a magnetic field of 500,000 or 1 million gauss. not in a split second, but like a magnet.
you would pull your self to planets magnetic fields, or would pull to iron in the planets.
right now they are making magnetic split second burst, & it is already at millions of gauss in a split second.
the strongest magnetic field is 1000 trillion gauss, & in a split second you can times every 1 gauss by 59 million each gauss. in the same but different way split second compression, you times every 3 gauss in that 1000 trillion gauss magnetic field by 10 billion gauss, every 3 gauss WOW. its off the scale. this is under the amount of gauss that will be made.
64424509440 quadrillion GAUSS.
so the end 3 numbers are 440 quadrillion. 560 more, make the next number after quadrillion. 9440 is 9 thousand 440 quadrillion. you can try add the rest up, & i did not add / times it by 100000000000 quadrillion as well. I got to 50000000000.
so if a 10,000 MRI scanner can pull metal to it at say 62m/s the speed that would make would be way more then 100ds of millions of times the speed of light/s.
the other way is to build the split second compressed magnetic burst in a chamber on the back of satellites or a space ship, & it will blow out the back vents where there is like all panels in a paten, of south side magnetic field / plates, and it will push away from it / push the craft very fast non stop.
so like putting to magnets next to each other. 1 way they will push away from each other, the other way they pull to each other.
you put the south side of what ever side it is, that when it blast out, will will send the space ship flying so fast its not funny.
or just put a magnetic field there that will do the same.
to turn in the same, put them on the sides & 1 at the front to slow down.
first it would be making millions of gauss that would send you way past 1 million km. in the future its making trillions of gauss & the times them by billions in split seconds.
well i think but you put metal next to a trillion gauss field, it will be magnetics to almost that amount. there is many ways to do this, this is just 4 way out of many ways.
if we want to go get to the edge of the universe ( for say) this is the way.
There's no tricky geometric mechanics involved. It's just Newton's 2nd law of motion. It wind is indeed merely pushing the sail. It is the force of the wind, not its velocity, that's accelerating the sail. A 20 mph wind has a force to push a sail regardless of its velocity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow does the slow wind catches the faster sail? If the sail is moving 80 mph due north and 20 mph wind is blowing due east, by tilting the sail 45 degrees north-west you split the wind force into north and east components. The north component provides additional thrust to the sail further increasing its speed.
You can do the same with photon sail but you won't exceed the speed of light bec. you need increasingly greater energy as you approach light speed. I doubt you can do this with solar wind and rotating e-sail.
The reason for rotation of the e-sail is to deploy and keep the wires in an extended form. The experiment is more vulnerable to space debris than any application further away from our space junk ridden altitudes. To my understanding, the thrust of the absorbed charged particles is caught by cylindrical arms of coaxial charge gradient surrounding each wire, not by some generated magnetic field, hence it needs to be understood that the collected charge will need to be rethrusted away, possibly with the aid of an ion rocket in a vacuum to achieve any sort of tacking trajectory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre we there yet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishow's that interstellar thing go?
Well, just be aware that this 180000 kph speed is reached after months of acceleration. A 360 hours journey to Mars would be achieved only if the sail had a running start, so that you do not take the acceleration phase into account.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe electric current in the wire will generate a magnetic field following Ampere's law. The solar wind will be deflected by this magnetic field similar to how earth's magnetic field deflects solar wind. The deflected ions provide thrust to the e-sail following the momentum conservation law. The article did not mention using the ions for ion rocket propulsion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe e-sail has to rotate slowly bec. the tensile strength of 25 micron wire is very low. The centrifugal force generated can easily break it. The current in the wire has to be very low, in milli-ampere range, bec. a higher current will melt the wire. This limits the strength of the magnetic field and thrust of the e-sail.
I think the e-sail has to rotate to keep it rigid. The centrifugal force will keep the wires straight. Without centrifugal force, the uneven force of the solar wind will bend and fold the e-sail like an umbrella in a strong wind. But this is tricky since the centrifugal force can easily break the extremely thin wire.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou really should get some medication for your disorder. Better yet, build a working prototype and park over the White House. The publicity would get you contracts all over the place. You would be an overnight billionaire. That is why no one believes you and we all think you are insane. You provide nothing and claim everything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWon't the angular momentum prevent tacking? What am I missing here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe wonderful sail could make Mars trips cheap and reliable with a supply visit every few months, with two-way shuttles by a supply ship that makes a round-trip 1 to 3 times a year, as planetary orbits allow. Long rotating tethers around Mars and Earth could pick up and deliver supplies and people as the sail ship swung by without slowing down. But it's too slow for insterstellar travel: Proxima Centauri at 180K km/hr would take 25,300 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMIT is doing some interesting research with materials and electrical charge at the nanoscale to increase clock speed. Has anyone discussed a particle collector/reactor system, that could absorb kinetic energy of matter and funnel it to a collector/reactor with a more rigid nanostructure sail that could act more like tinfoil cloth that would in effect "catch the rain" during the voyage for fuel?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeeing as Space is a fairly busy place, I am curious as to the mechanism(s) to be used for collision avoidance. While I am certainly a fan of science, etc. I think this doesn't pass the "Is this worth taking money off the public's dinner table" funding litmus test. If private entities such as Google, Apple, etc. may want to fund this, well that would be swell. Adding to the public debt with this is a bit much. Tough times call for tough decisions. Just like the decisions many families must make on a daily basis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe probable source is the idea of dark matter and dark energy. If anyone manage to harness them you could probably do anything.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The universe gives us the bigger picture, science only gives us fragments."-Eric
So it is valid to explore every possibly no matter how odd they seem to be.