Talk-Polywell.org

NewSpace 2010: Advanced Space Propulsion



Video of the panel discussion

Approaching Warp Speed: Advanced Space Propulsion

Bruce Pittman (Moderator) – NASA Ames Space Portal
Franklin Chang-Diaz – CEO and President, Ad Astra Rocket Company
Leik Myrabo – CEO, Lightcraft Technologies, Inc.; Research Associate Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Steve Howe – Director, Center for Space Nuclear Research
Vince Teofilo – Lockheed Martin

Was a good vid. Shame Vince didn't delve deeper into the Poly concept but combining it with VASIMR does seem a good idea.

Contrast that against the Lightcraft. Why is it some people have no common sense and yet want to spend other people's money? Yeah, sure, we'll see a multi-trillion dollar, multi-gigawatt death-ray in orbit real soon. Who could object to that?

How dopey.

Terrible shame they didn't invite Jim Woodward to speak on the M-E thruster.

When I was an undergrad, I worked with Leik Myrabo on his project. I always thought it was a little farfetched, I guess that was why he gave me a B, eventhough my part was the only part praised by NASA at our end of year review. (No actual physics, just a light show to show what it would look like while in operation. It was very hard to find a bulb that could come close enough to replicating the frequency and intensity of flashes of light from the detonations.)

There are actually so many reasons the laser is a bad idea that it's hard to count. You have these very oddball trajectories. Can't launch to places like ISS because that requires a much lower orbit than what you can obtain, unless you circle the planet with laser projectors.

Remember, it really doesn't matter how fast you accelerate or how much vertical delta V you have. What matters is the 26k mph horizontal, and that's darn hard to get when your spacecraft is always suddenly over the horizon.

The infrastructure is massive, many times that of shuttle. You'd think we would all have learned our lesson by now.

Just a bad idea. . .almost as bad as the space elevator.

1 MW/kg to LEO for the lightcraft. ~30 GW for a full shuttle payload. Maybe he meant pulsed. Agreed, bad idea.

Disappointing that Bussard's QED and Woodward were never mentioned. They barely scratched the surface.

I was intrigued by the sub-net-power IEC Propulsion concept to make ordinary plasma propulsion more efficient by using IEC fusion below net power.... that IMHO is a good idea for interim implementation of fusion before net power is commercialized.

GIThruster wrote: Just a bad idea. . .almost as bad as the space elevator.

Ooh, thems fightin' words son.

On a positive note, Vince Teofilo of Lockheed Martin is no fan of ITER.

He correctly pronounced "ITER" as "EATER" several times, as in eater of billions of $ better spent on Polywell, DPF, FRC, etc.

GIThruster wrote:

Just a bad idea. . .almost as bad as the space elevator.

Ooh, thems fightin' words son.

yeah, quotes and all that above. . .

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Truly, not looking for a fight but if you think anyone is going to think it's okay to hang millions of tons of carbon over their heads for any use whatsoever, I have a bridge to sell you.

We don't need these thoughtless, useless, dopey solutions from sci-fi. We need solutions that are safe, quick, convenient and economical. We need propellantless propusion and as long as dread, dopey engineers hang out for less, we won't see funding for what's real--the M-E thruster.

GIThruster wrote:We need propellantless propusion and as long as dread, dopey engineers hang out for less, we won't see funding for what's real--the M-E thruster.

We need magic space pixies, to wave their wands! Woohoo!

On a more serious note:
Vince seemed to have no clue what a Polywell was and how it worked. Did he really show a graphic of trying to "heat" a plasma of Boron atoms with a proton beam in a polywell?

IntLibber wrote:I was intrigued by the sub-net-power IEC Propulsion concept to make ordinary plasma propulsion more efficient by using IEC fusion below net power.... that IMHO is a good idea for interim implementation of fusion before net power is commercialized.

WizWom wrote:Vince seemed to have no clue what a Polywell was and how it worked. Did he really show a graphic of trying to "heat" a plasma of Boron atoms with a proton beam in a polywell?

viewtopic.php?p=34046&highlight=#34046

Agree with GiThruster, space elevator = bad idea for so many reasons.
On the going "straight up"- thingy. I think it depends on how far "straight up" you go. Once you are far enough "up" you just have to adjust the angle you "fall back down" and earths gravity will pull you into a nice orbit (I imagine it a bit like the sling shot principle that they use to accelerate space craft). I have not done the math, so I do not quite know how high this straight up is, but I guess it is quite high...
Still I find the whole idea of a lightcraft not very practical either...

Any space transport system that relies upon huge, in fact unprecedented amounts of "stuff" to be transported, in order to drive the cost per mass down; is certainly doomed to failure.

People have been playing this game for decades. Earliest I can remember was the Solar Sat Power Station craziness in the mid 70's. Yeah, it can be a cheap form of energy, if you neglect the trillions it takes to build the infrastructure.

We just need to stop with the silliness. It's truly nuts that things like the space elevator have gotten funding and the M-E thruster has not.

WizWom wrote:

GIThruster wrote:We need propellantless propusion and as long as dread, dopey engineers hang out for less, we won't see funding for what's real--the M-E thruster.

We need magic space pixies, to wave their wands! Woohoo!

Are you familiar with Dr. Woodward's Mach-Effect conjecture and the experimental data-set backing it? It's by no means fully proven yet, but this body of work is far more real than "magic space pixes"...

I'm surprised to see such strong critics of the space elevator concept in this forum. Once the ribbon material is manufacturable, it is a tractable engineering problem at a very reasonable scale, and considerably smaller than many other modern engineering projects.

I have not encountered any concerns that weren't directly addressed by Edward's books and the NASA feasibility studies. Please keep an open mind, and don't dismiss it based on your own imagined problems.

While I don't have "The Space Elevator" in front of me, the projected launch costs were very modest, and even if the paper-thin ribbon did fall on your head, it wouldn't hurt you. It also so (relatively) cheap, and offers such enormous benefits, that it would be foolish not to invest in. Of course, that applies to many things, the Polywell included.