Blog 7: Space Propulsion

Though designing and building a rocket is a very complex endeavor, most people have a pretty good idea of what makes them fly: Burn a whole lot of fuel to produce thrust. This method does a great job of getting a rocket up to a high speed, relative to our planet and the solar system. However, these rockets are nowhere near the speed needed to travel to other planets. The problem is that rockets need tons of fuel in order to generate enough thrust to get going really fast, but this fuel is heavy, and heavier things accelerate slower. 

There have been several proposed solutions to this problem, and all of them are pretty crazy. First, scientists have proposed creating a ship that produces thrust by detonating small nuclear bombs behind the spacecraft; these bombs would push the spaceship, which is shielded by a protective plate, forward. The scientists that proposed this design calculated that if one million bombs are detonated behind a ship, it could get to alpha centauri in about one century, which is pretty quick relative to the speeds we can produce now. Another idea is to use antimatter annihilation, which converts all of an atom’s atomic mass into energy. This would produce a vast amount of energy, but the technology required is more in the realm of science fiction rather than reality at this point. The general takeaway is: If were going to get to another star in less than thousands of years, we need to find some new crazy sources of energy.

Artists rendering of an antimatter engine. Source: Medium