Cars - Anti-matter

"Mike Dworetsky" > wrote in message
:

> Joe Snodgrass wrote:
> > On Jan 30, 8:02 pm, robertva > wrote:
> >> On 1/30/2011 7:27 PM, Joe Snodgrass wrote:
> >>
> >>> What's the best way to make anti-matter for your rocket engine? An
> >>> accelerator. That's why Clarke's spaceship was so long in the 2001
> >>> movie.
> >>
> >> All this time I thought it has fission powered engines (and general
> >> electrical power generation as well) and the long boom was supposed
> >> to reduce the crew's radiation exposure. There wold also need to be
> >> some serious volume for consumables storage, with two crewmen eating
> >> and breathing for the entire voyage. There would also need to be
> >> some place to store the air pumped out of that huge bay every time
> >> they used a pod.
> >
> > Unless it were a pulsed engine. You spend a few days building up your
> > anti-matter supply and then, PCHOOM!!, fire all of the guns at once
> > and explode into space. I'm still working on why you'd want to do
> > that, but I do know that one of the Skunk Works' classified projects
> > at Area 51 is a pulsed conventional engine. They must like 'em pulsed
> > for some reason.
>
> Thermodynamics still applies; it would take more energy to produce the
> antimatter than you would get out of it, because the manufacturing is not
> 100% efficient [partly because production results in various particles that
> leak away and carry energy]. Better to apply that energy to producing
> propulsion directly than producing antimatter.
>
> A pulsed conventional engine (like the WW2 V1 flying bombs) is very basic
> technology, very cheap to manufcture, but remarkably enough, it still
> requires a fuel tank to be filled up before launch; they don't manufacture
> the fuel on board during flight, in between pulses.

In the 1950s, the Pentagon funded a research project, Orion, to build a
starship that could be powered by the explosion of a series of atomic
bombs, one after the other. A "pusher plate" made of special materials
would shield the starship cabin from the atomic explosions, and act as a
shock absorber to smooth out the impulses. A dispenser not unlike that
in a Coca-Cola vending machine would drop atomic bombs out the
spaceship, one after the other. These would explode against the pusher
plate, one at a time, propelling the ship forward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project..._propulsion%29

Orion was cancelled when the U.S. signed the Outer Space Treaty which
forbade nuclear testing in space.

-- Steven L.