On Wednesday, September 21, 2016 at 4:24:10 PM UTC+12, William Mook wrote:
On Saturday, September 3, 2016 at 6:46:26 AM UTC+12, wrote:
The Impossible Propulsion Drive Is Heading to Space:

"The EmDrive, a hypothetical miracle propulsion system for outer space, has been
sparking heated arguments for years. Now, Guido Fetta plans to settle the
argument about reactionless space drives for once and for all by sending one into
space to prove that it really generates thrust without exhaust."

See:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...-reactionless/

This is of intrest;

https://www.fusenet.eu/node/575#main-content

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/abuzaid2/

https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/...on-a-chip.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG1TUhYLAeM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89qvy8whxY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG1kVIIy2Ok

So, proton beam that produces a 675 keV proton beam and impact it on boron-11 nuclei to produce 8.7 MeV of energy across three alpha particles.

http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/...8/24028563.pdf

With 8.7 MeV spread across three alpha particles, we have 2.9 MeV per alpha. Extracting the 0.676 MeV from these alpha's to power the highly efficient accelerator on a chip leaves 2.675 MeV per alpha. That's 11,358 km/sec (7,057 miles per second!) exhaust speed!

So, a kg of protium along with 11 kg of boron-11 produces 12 kg of helium-4 with a jet energy of 774.02 trillion joules of energy. Now, to impart 9..2 km/sec delta vee with such a jet this 12 kg of material can lift 14,820 kg of rocket! If the structure is 4% (592.8 kg) then the payload is 14,216 kg.

What about a rocket that boosted off Earth at 2 gees and continued at 1 gee above background - across the 384,400 km separating Earth and Moon - and landed on the moon at 1+1/6 gee? You would ipart 136.3 km/sec to the rocket. Returning to the Earth the same way requires a delta vee of 272.8 km/sec. This requires 2.374% propellant fraction. So, a 2,000 kg vehicle (the size of a large sedan) requries 47.5 kg of propellant( 4.0 kg of protiun, 43.5 kg of boron-11) It takes 3.5 hours to fly to the moon this way, and 3.5 hours to fly back. No more than two gees is felt at lift of and landing on Earth and one gee is felt throughout most of the trip.

At $1 per kg for the material it costs $25 in fuel each way. At $200,000 for the spacecraft, with 85% utilisation, and 8.5% discount over 10 years, it costs $15 each way for the capital equipment. It costs another $5 each way for maintenance and parts.

A two gee boost to the antipodes (accelerating at 2 gees at a constant radius for 6,396 km - and then cruising at 22.4 km/sec at a constant radius for 7,208 km - and then slowing at 2 gees at a constant radius for 6,396 km - arrives at the antipodes in 43.5 minutes! Doing this all with rockets outside the atmosphere requires 44.6 km/sec delta vee and 0.4% propellant fraction! So, a 2,000 kg vehicle consumes 8 kg of propellant - and costs $8 per trip and another $3 per trip for vehicle cost and maintenance. WIth six passengers this is as little as $2 per person per trip. Shorter distances require less money - scaled at 1/sqrt(distance). 1/100th of 20,000 km - is 200 km - and that takes 1/10th the time and money all things being equal. Less than $1 per trip.

1.511*10^11 meters is the current distance from Earth to Mars )21 September 2016)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/...bc0d14bda71f7e

It takes 69 hours to get to Mars. It takes 427.4 kg of material. That's $430 for fuel and $394 per the equipment and maintenance - each way. Nearly three days each way.

The point is, this is far out technology, but it doesn't violate the laws of physics! It also provides unlimited free energy by today's standards, and frees humanity of Earth, and gives us instant access around Earth!

We can go anywhere in 45 minutes or less on Earth, visit the moon in 3.5 hours, visit anywhere in the inner solar system in less time than it takes a ship to travel the oceans of Earth today. We can mine rock directly and extract unlimited materials at very little cost!

11 kg of Boron 11 and 1 kg of protium yield 774 trillion joules of energy! Each gram releases 64.6 Gigajoules of energy - the equivalent of 11 barrels of crude oil! Humanity produces 4.6 million metric tons per year of the Stuff, 80% of it is Boron 11 - that's 3.7 million metric tons. 7,328 metric tons of Boron 11 converted to energy meets ALL humanity's current needs.

Boron is about 10 ppm by wieght. That's 28 grams of the stuff every cubic meter of rock. That's 1808.8 gigajoules of energy. It takes 42 gigajoules of energy to vaporise a cubic meter of rock - separating it into its component atoms! Then condensing the plasma back into elemental form - separating out each atomic species, to be recombined by a 3D print mechanism! So, 43x the energy needed to extract the boron from the rock is available to support the process.

Put differently, all the resource problems of humanity, along with energy and transport, are resolved by reducing this bit of REAL science to practice!

At 310 Watts/m2 and fusion powered LED lights matched to chlorophyll produce 9 g/m2/day dry matter with a 35 mm separation between plates - a cubic meter of algae solution illuminated continuously and circulated with the help of microdevices flowing in solution - produces 261 grams of dry biomass per day. A person consumes 0.5 kg per day of - and so requires 2 cubic meters of hardware massing 1,950 kg to feed a person indefinitely using a 3D printer. At 36 kW per machine runs for 100 years on 1.76 kg of boron-11/protium mix.