Playing with electricity :)

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 03:18:44 GMT, "Don Kelly" Gave us:

I just ULd a nice backyard (garage actually) pic of an eight foot tall TC up in abse.

Reply to
MassiveProng
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Yeah, that is old hat. As electrical workers, we should be devoting our efforts to more modern pursuits, such as designing a good antimatter engine for a spacecraft.

Such an engine is essentially electrical, so that falls into our domain of expertise.

Here is the website to get us started:

See pages 8,9,10, and 13 of that site, for a layman's overview of antimatter, page ten addresses general propulsion problems.

14 nanograms of antimatter would be enough fuel to propel a spacecraft to Mars.

(a nanogram is a billionth of a gram)

Contrast that to the millions of pounds of chemical fuel presently used by the Space Shuttle.

Chemical engines are doing good to get us to Mars at an average speed of

21,000 miles per hour, taking roughly four months to cover the 60 million mile journey.

A antimatter engine would take one hour to cover the same distance, traveling at one-tenth the speed of light, or roughly 66 million miles per hour.

Hop to it, guys, enough of this crap of trivial experimentation.

My own specialty would be to engineer the magnetic rocket nozzle thruster of the spacecraft engine. Many problems there, not the least of which would be the intense gamma radiation spewed out the nozzle of the antimatter engine, which would spell death for any other spacecraft caught in the "wake" of that exhaust.

I would suggest a covey of smaller unmanned spacecraft surrounding any main spacecraft, whose sole purpose would be to generate a strong magnetic field to protect the main spacecraft, in much the same way that the earth's magnetic field protects us from deadly radiation.

Mark-

Reply to
Mark Conrad

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:09:30 GMT, Mark Conrad Gave us:

Control nuclear propulsion will come long before that does.

Reply to
MassiveProng

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