On the other hand, there's another approach to interstellar travel that could - in principle - make our science-fiction dreams come true. Because dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter (mostly) but passes right through it, you wouldn't have any difficulty collecting it in a specific volume of space it would always be there as you moved through the galaxy. fuel is always to be found simply by traveling through the galaxy. Even at this record-setting rate, it would still take thousands of years to reach the nearest star.Īll rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel, but if a dark matter engine were created, new. If you start off with a rocket where 99% of your initial mass is fuel, and you assume that your fuel is perfectly 100% efficient (as though it were pure matter-antimatter annihilation), you'd wind up with a final speed of 460,000 mph (740,000 kph). In other words, let's imagine you can shoot exhaust out of your vehicle at an incredible rate: 100,000 mph (about 160,000 kph), relative to the rocket itself. Read that again: including any fuel that's still on board. The key problem is as follows: whenever you burn fuel, you have to accelerate the entire mass of your spacecraft, including any fuel that's still on board. Having to bring your own fuel on board is a severely limiting factor as far as the speed at which we are capable of traveling through intergalactic space. portion of its fuel to create thrust can wind up traveling through the Universe. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is required to describe how fast a spacecraft that burns through a. It's a huge improvement, if we can realize it, but there's still a fundamental problem with accelerating to speeds that will carry you interstellar distances on reasonable timescales. Sure, we can go for some type of nuclear fuel, but that's only marginally better, achieving efficiencies of around 0.1%. Even with all the chemical-based tricks we can perform, there are no known reactions that allow us to improve on this. Electron transitions, however, are on the order of a few (typically 1-10) eV of energy. Most of an atom's mass is in the form of protons and neutrons, each of which have a mass that contains around 10 9 eV worth of energy. The reason is as follows: chemical reactions rely on electron transitions between atoms and molecules. NASAĪt most, though, chemical-based reactions are somewhere around 0.0001% efficient. For all of our history on Earth, the only way we've ever reached space is through the use of chemical-based fuels. Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. ![]() This spectacular streak shot was taken from Hangar AF on. The launch of Cassini, on October 15, 1997.
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