"George Kinley" wrote in message ...
Are there any way for rockets to fly in space , other then throwing mass
out in one direction and moving in other

I computed a table relating power to thrust, and was off by a factor
of g0 - that's the acceleration of gravity. In metric units this is
9.82 m/s/s. So the table posted parallel to this was WATTS PER
NEWTON, not WATTS PER KG as stated in the text.

Okay so the revised table for WATTS PER KG OF THRUST is;

HOW BIG IS YOUR ENGINE? IN WATTS



Auto Airline Supertanker
Type Ve W/kg HP/lb 1000 300000 500000000
Chemical5.6 27496 16.76 27.4E+6 8.25E+9 1.3748E+13
Fission 42000 206E+6 125702 2.1E+11 6.2E+13 1.0311E+17
Fusion 134000 657E+6 401050 6.6E+11 2.0E+14 3.2897E+17
Photon 300000 1.47E+9 897875 1.5E+12 4.4E+14 7.365E+17

Other interesting Numbers:

Average US Home: 833
200 HP Engine: 143,000
US Utility Grid: 800E+9
Humanity (all forms)4E+12
Solar Output: 3.8E+26

If humanity were space faring they'd have say, four billion fusion
rocket fliers the size of autos, along with say 4 million airliner
sized vehicles and 40,000 supertanker size freighters. At any one
time a quarter of the autosized vehicles and airliner sized vehicles
might be operating, three-quarters of the big guys would be operating,
so humanity's power consumption if spacefaring would be;

AUTO - FUSION - 1E9 * 6.6E11 = 6.6E20
AIRCRAFT - FUSION - 1E6 * 2.0E14 = 2.0E20
SUPERTANK- PHOTON - 3E4 * 7.4E17 = 2.2E22
INTERNAL USE - industrial use 2.0E13

Which all adds up to 2.2E22 watts of usage - about 1/17,000th the
sun's total output

At a 7% economic growth rate we could double usage every 10 years.
This lets us compute that it would take 323 years for humanity to
reach this level of consumption.

Of course, widespread use of laser beamed energy and nuclear fusion
power (once its available) would be a quantum leap that would not be
part and parcel of the natural growth of the existing energy
infrastructure. In that case, we might expect a doubling every year
rather than every ten years. Just as low cost computing caused a
doubling of computer use. That would mean we could transition to a
space faring species with a spaceship in every garage in a single
generation.

Sweet.