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#1
February 7th 08, 06:40 PM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
What if instead of our going with whatever's small, extremely cheap,
fast and rad-hard robotic, what if going with larger is nearly always better? Perhaps this new and improved topic of "Building Spaceships" for accommodating us frail humans on interstellar treks, and of those multi generation habitat spacecraft being extensively ion thrusted, along with the wizardly help of William Mook and those few of us unafraid of whatever's out there, as such may be a little easier said than done, not to mention folks having to deal with my dyslexic encryption and frequent typos that can't always manage to keep those numbers or terminology half straight. Perhaps such a large scale ion thrusted spacecraft isn't quite as insurmountable as we've been told, and it's not that a pair or quad worth of substantial LRBs would not have to help get this rather substantial package off the pad (in modules if need be, and assembled at the moon's L1). However, upon launch and of once reaching the cool upper most atmosphere is where the potential of ion thrusting could start to contribute w/o Radon saturating Earth in the process, and obviously from whatever LEO point onward is where the real potential of ion thrust becomes impressive, especially since this method of electro-rocket thrust can be sustained for as long as the given cache of ions and electrical energy holds out. (with radium-radon there's a failsafe worth of 1600+ years before reaching half-life, so there's never a total lack of those Rn222 alpha/ions, and there's even some electron energy derived from the Radium-Rn breeder reactor) Given a sufficient cache of hefty ions and a sufficient onboard supply of electron energy for artificially accelerating and redirecting those ions into a narrow exit trajectory, and if this thrust is the direct result of a given ion flow rate or mass of whatever ion particles per second times the exit velocity squared, as then where's the insurmountable problem, other than your not standing anywhere behind those ion thrusters. Radon just so happens to make for a very good cache of substantially massive ions that are already quite active/reactive and supposedly going places as is, at roughly 1.63e7 m/sec. Liquid Radon or LRn222 represents a nifty fluid cache of a easily stored concentration of Radon gas (though because of its short half-life it's still very much one of those use it or lose it substances, with possibly an extended life within a near solid 0 K storage), of which I believe this cache of Rn222 can be electrically induced or excited into exiting this ion thruster at a velocity as great as 0.1'c' (perhaps an exit velocity of 0.5'c' is technically doable if we're talking about a radon pumped laser cannon). Similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_engines , http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/47966/01/paperColettiMPD.pdf Our lord all-knowing (aka World FactBook) Mook says; "Check it out" Here is how much thrust a rocket engine produces; F = mdot * Ve where mdot = mass flow rate, as kg/sec Ve = exhaust speed m/sec F = force (newtons) kg m/sec/sec Here is how much power a rocket engine's jet produces P = 1/2 * mdot * Ve^2 That is, the rate at which energy must be added to the exhaust jet is the kinetic energy of the parts. - - - - Of course this is not about any Mook passive alpha particle directing application, instead taking efficiency of the overall electrical and ion tossing system into account (such as thermal energy losses) adds to this existing amount of ion worth via applied electrical and magnetic energy that'll focus and accelerate those ions. So, it is not nearly as simple to express as one as Mook might suggest. However, at the notion of our getting rid of this initial tonne worth of our liquid cache of LRn222, at the ion mass flow rate of 1 kg/s, whereas the kinetic power or energy worth of thrust supposedly becomes: If the 1 kg/s flow of Rn ions and the exit Ve were made as great as 10%'c' = 3e7 m/s P = .5 * 9e14 = 4.5e14 kgf At utilizing this ion exit velocity of 0.1'c' (3e7 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using up one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of creating 4.5e14 kgf, of which this substance would push a 4.5e12 kg (4.5 gigatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to the gravity at the surface of Earth. At the more realistic ion exit velocity of 1% light speed is 0.01'c' (3e6 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of 4.5e12 kgf, of which would push a 4.5e10 kg (45 megatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to gravity at the surface of Earth. Of course the 45 megatonne spacecraft isn't hardly any more likely than human DNA or whatever spacecraft structurally surviving 100 gee. So, to start off with we'd likely have ourselves a whole lot smaller than 45 megatonne spacecraft, such as perhaps only as great as 4.5 megatonnes that'll exit away from Earth at perhaps as great as 10 gee, then once 10r (63,730 km and just 1% Earth gravity) is reached, whereas this is when the ion exit velocity could be safely punched up from 0.001'c' to 0.01'c', and eventually the maximum of 0.1'c' could be applied to as little as using a gram of Rn222 per second, because at 0.1'c' or better exit velocity is where you really do not require all that much mass flow per second. 0.1% light speed is 0.001'c' = 3e5 m/s 1 kg/sec at 3e5 m/s = .5 * 9e10 = 4.5e10 kgf 4.5e10 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 10 gee Using a gram/sec: 4.5e7 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 0.1 gee I believe that 1000 seconds of 10 gee acceleration is worth 78.4 km/s, though of course we'd be past the 10r of Earth within the first 600 seconds, and thereby able to ion whiz past that 78.4 km/s mark like it was standing still. This next part is often where my math takes yet another nose dive, but since I do not have the fly-by-rocket software and none others that claim as always being all-knowing are seldom willing to share, is why I'll just have to make do, especially since even the warm and fuzzy likes of Mook always takes the lowest road possible in order diminish and/or disqualify whatever isn't of his idea to start off with, excluding just enough of the good stuff in order to foil any further thought process. The required energy for a given thousand seconds worth of accelerating those Rn222 ions up to 3e5 m/s isn't exactly insignificant, demanding perhaps at least 245.2 GW.h (8.826 e14 J) for accommodating all 16.7 minutes worth of ion thrust. However, due to the overall efficiency of this energy transfer into accelerating those Rn ions is why it'll more than likely demand somewhat greater energy for accomplishing this task of tossing out the entire tonne worth those Rn222 alpha ions at the rate of one kg/s, even if that's initially accomplished at this minimal 0.001"c". However, since the existing Rn alpha particle velocity is already self motivated at 1.6e7 m/s(.054'c'), perhaps along with given another 5.6 MeV boost is where the required energy can be limited as to whatever's necessary for accomplishing a good exit focus or creating that laser cannon like beam, in which case the required ion thruster energy could become relatively minimal for accomplishing an impressive exit ion velocity of 3.26e7 m/s. At times this spacecraft is going to require a hole lot more electrical energy than any cache of Radium to Radon reactor could manage at 32 kw/Ra tonne, or even 320 kw/breeder Ra tonne. However, at a gross spacecraft mass of 4.5e6 tonnes, there's no problem with incorporating an h2o2/aluminum fuel cell of 100 GW.h capacity, or accommodating whatever Lithium nanotube ion battery storage, nuclear reactors or fusion alternatives. Once trekking off into interstellar space, and especially upon getting this craft past our nearest interstellar L1, and of the other gravity pulling us towards the likes of the relatively massive Sirius star/ solar system that we're already in blueshift as headed towards Sirius, as this is when as little as a mdot microgram/sec of Rn222 at the exit velocity of 0.2'c' would be more than sufficient ion thrust for continually accelerating this 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft towards the gravity pull of Sirius. For a one microgram/sec of Rn222 mdot at 0.2'c' example: P = .5e-9 * 3.6e15 = 1.5e6 kgf (1,500 tonnes/s of thrust, or in this case 0.000333 gee) The next problem gets down to the business of continually building up another cache of LRn from the Ra-Rn breeder reactor while on the fly, on behalf of that pesky matter of our having to ion retrothrust long before overshooting the intended target. At 4.5e9 kg, stopping this sucker that's by now going like a bat out of hell (possibly having reached 0.1'c') is going to take some doings. Of course, there would be generations of new and improved minds onboard in order to figure most of this out before arriving into the Sirius star/solar system, not to mention whatever could have been transmitted from Earth over the past century. BTW, at this point of topic argument sake, this mission to Sirius is a one way ticket to ride, with absolutely no travel package guaranties or ticket refunds allowed, because we may not be able to sufficiently retrothrust in order to save any of those brave souls, and a purely gravity-well trajectory turn-around or that of sufficiently aerobraking is at best iffy, although a substantial solar wind parachute as brake might eventually work. Also, recall the sheer size of these required ion thrust nacelles, as being somewhat Star Trek Enterprise like, and for all we know in need of those lithium crystals or perhaps lithium nanotubes as part of their function (after all, any good science fiction uses the regular laws of physics and the best available science, and for all we know lithium could still be part of it). .. - Brad Guth 
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#2
February 8th 08, 03:59 PM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
A good source of thruster ions that'll keep coming is from the likes
of Radium that creates the Radon (Rn222) gas. Radium is somewhat rare, but it is not as an element uncommon. However, of what's most uncommon is any public disclosures or education about Radium. Apparently the element of Radium is officially taboo/nondisclosure rated, especially as far as to who has what and at whatever current market value. Essentially, this need-to-know market price of Radium is at least a thousand fold more government cartel hocus-pocus price fixed than anything of fossil fuels or even of yellowcake, though the formal extraction process of obtaining roughly 100 milligrams per yellowcake tonne is essentially a robotic task from start to finish. For the most part, Radium is actually another one of those discarded elements within spent nuclear fuel, as well as found at less concentrations within most mineral tailings or otherwise given as a slight part of most all fossil fuels, that which the fossil energy industry as a whole do not bother to extract or otherwise divert this element from the subsequent CO2/Nox laced combustion soot, much of which simply goes either directly into our atmosphere or if in full clean-air compliance merely gets relocated into various landfills that'll eventually end up eroding and/or blending back into the general environment. Of course none of the valuable 3He has been collected either, so what the hell. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM) http://www.eoearth.org/article/Natur...aterials_(NORM) A great amount of Radium and subsequently Radon comes into our surface environment though fossil fuel extractions and subsequent usage, and much of whatever's initially kept from being atmospherically dispersed as CO2 and NOx contaminated soot that's laced with a slight trace of Radium is simply buried in relatively shallow graves or in some cases utilized as fill for open pit mining site recovery. In other words, most all of the mined elements of radioactive fuel that used to be safely sequestered far enough underground, essentially away from our frail DNA and surface environment, has been systematically and artificially reintroduced into our life sustaining environment, along with as little public education as possible so that folks are simply snookered into being unaware of these surrounding concentrations and dosage levels that we all have to cope within. Radon gas; "reportedly causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States alone." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon If that be the case, then by any global/world standard could be looking at as many as 400,000 Radon gas related deaths per year, if not an all-inclusive 500,000 in radiation contamination related deaths per year (keeping in mind that fewer than 500 pandemic deaths per year would become a world health alert with multiple quarantines imposed). Therefore, rounding up as much of the spare/surplus Radium as possible seems like a perfectly good sort of task worth doing, so that it can be either put safely away or at least properly utilized in a manner that doesn't further traumatize our frail DNA and badly failing environment any more than absolutely necessary. Like U238 yellowcake of 80% grade, whereas perhaps the 100 mg/tonne of 90~97% extracted grade of this refined Radium ore doesn't amount to all that much by volume, but clearly what there is of it has become extremely valuable as well as humanly lethal if continually ignored as is, not to mention what adverse affects are imposed upon all other plant, animal and microbe forms of life that surrounds and benefits us, and in one way or another gets involved and/or consumed by us humans. Radium is roughly 60 fold more radioactive than Uranium, is also of at least 6 million fold greater worth per equal weight, and obviously the extremely active Radon(Rn222) decay element is flying right off the charts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Colorado "Although no more than a trace of radium was present in the ore, newly discovered medical applications had made radium worth $100 per milligram, making the radium in the carnotite ore worth much more than the vanadium or uranium." (however, we're also talking of those extremely old dollars worth better than twenty fold of our current dollar that's not exactly floating) As of 1940, Radium was made artificially worth as little as $25/ milligram, and as of today our American medical cartel inflated value of pure Radium metal is always floating closer to whatever the market or cancer patient will bare, such as $175/milligram (that's actually relatively dirt cheap compared to what it used to cost in those old hard earned dollars of nearly a century ago), and with the market price of yellowcake about to reach $1000/kg within this next decade is only suggesting that the rare element within of Radium will likely be in hot pursuit of exceeding the $1000/milligram mark. In the World there's roughly 100 kg of medical Radium hording (not including secret amounts held by various governments and of private speculation hording), and because this Radium salt or metallic alloy can be utilized over and over thousands of times, and also because of its given artificial cartel market value is why this element is most always fully recovered per usage, and as such there's way more than enough to go around for medical applications, along with more on its way for those capable of paying the price, because it can be extracted on demand. Radium chloride (bromide salt) is less costly to produce or extract from spent nuclear fuel, than having to create a pure metallic Radium alloy, but because so many NRC and the medical cartel folks like to live large, it'll likely still costs you about $500/milligram and even if need be marked up from there so that their normal 10:1 profit margins don't suffer. (actually that profit margin is in excess of a 1000:1 if you take into account how many times the same substance gets reused and thus resold over and over) http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...CF&oref=slogin The previous Radium cartel market price had once upon a time been as great as $160,000/gram, and again that was in old 1930 dollars that were actually worth something. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...758086,00.html Monday, Aug. 09, 1937 "A rich radium deposit is one which yields 90 to 120 milligrams (.00315 to .0042 oz.) nearly pure radium bromide salt per ton of concentrated ore (50 tons of crude ore). From ore bodies of such richness in northwestern Canada the refining plant is able to extract one gram of commercially pure radium from 550 tons of mined ore. A San Diego mining engineer and chemist named F. S. Kearney, now working in Mexico, assayed Mrs. Bishop's ore at 130 milligrams of radium per ton. This high figure, Mrs. Bishop said, was confirmed when she sent a sample to the Institut de Radium in Paris (once presided over by the late Marie Curie). Present price of radium is $25 per milligram, $25,000 per gram, $700,000 per ounce. Mrs. Bishop suspected for years that she had radium ore on her property, kept it quiet until her claim was cleared in the courts. Last week the excited little woman did not know just how extensive her deposit was, but she and her lawyers laid plans for a thorough survey and hoped to write a new chapter in the shifting course of world radium production." Just another interesting matter of a good ion generating fact about smoke detectors: "one Am-241 emitted alpha particle will produce 150,000 ions", so perhaps other than Radium-226 that'll gradually yield to becoming Rn222, as such can instead be put to good use on behalf of feeding large scale ion thrusters. There's actually quite a good amount of Radium226 to behold (because it's what ever so gradually makes Radon gas, and there's lots of Rn222 to go around), although most of this Radium has not been systematically collected or much less isolated from our environment, even though it's extremely valuable. Never the less it's still not getting officially rounded up at more than 1% of what's otherwise getting artificially diverted into our badly failing environment, and perhaps that's the real reason why so little information is published as to the natural and artificially established inventory of Radium, much of which is held within existing inventories of yellowcake, in weapons grade and spent nuclear fuel that no one on Earth seems to want anything to with unless getting paid hundreds of billions of our hard earned loot up front. Via fossil fuel explorations, extractions and various forms of consumption is where much of the naturally occurring Radium has found its way into our polluted surface and oceans of growing dead zone environments, and oddly there's still no technical plan or even spin of action for collecting this element of Radium that's associated within such fossil fuels and various mineral tailings. Much like our FEMA in action, the lethal and whatever valued energy related aspects of Radium is only getting studied to death, though mostly on behalf of product hording and cover-thy-butt protecting, for making damn certain that no one in government or corporate whatever can ever be held accountable. (perhaps they'll end up blaming everything on Marie Curie, if not Muslims). At any rate, the extremely active element of Radium is quite interesting and valuable in far more ways than most realize or are being allowed to learn about. Whenever I mention the use of Radium is when the Usenet lights usually go out, and I can here that door slamming shut. It's almost as taboo/nondisclosure rated as for asking where the hell that planet Venus was hiding throughout all of those NASA/Apollo years. Go figure. Since the Ux U3O8 (aka yellowcake) was recently worth nearly $310/kg as of June 2007, and is currently hovering at the subsidized mark of $210/kg, but due to the ongoing global fossil fuel fiasco is likely to push that U3O8 into LEO at any moment, means that the much greater spot market value of Radium follows suit at reaching the potential worth of exceeding $1000/mg. This is obviously good news if you so happen to own a given cache of Radium, though bad news for your bank account if your cancer treatments or whatever else involves Radium. Government tolerated hording and subsequent profiteering is what keeps Radium spendy and otherwise not getting as well collected as it could be, whereas the more corrupt our puppet government gets, the more we get to pay in ways other than just our hard earned loot. I'll do my best to polish up this information, in order to show how we've been wasting this Radium resource and otherwise wasting decades of time that should have been better spent going to/from those nifty off-world places. .. - Brad Guth On Feb 7, 10:40 am, BradGuth wrote: What if instead of our going with whatever's small, extremely cheap, fast and rad-hard robotic, what if going with larger is nearly always better? Perhaps this new and improved topic of "Building Spaceships" for accommodating us frail humans on interstellar treks, and of those multi generation habitat spacecraft being extensively ion thrusted, along with the wizardly help of William Mook and those few of us unafraid of whatever's out there, as such may be a little easier said than done, not to mention folks having to deal with my dyslexic encryption and frequent typos that can't always manage to keep those numbers or terminology half straight. Perhaps such a large scale ion thrusted spacecraft isn't quite as insurmountable as we've been told, and it's not that a pair or quad worth of substantial LRBs would not have to help get this rather substantial package off the pad (in modules if need be, and assembled at the moon's L1). However, upon launch and of once reaching the cool upper most atmosphere is where the potential of ion thrusting could start to contribute w/o Radon saturating Earth in the process, and obviously from whatever LEO point onward is where the real potential of ion thrust becomes impressive, especially since this method of electro-rocket thrust can be sustained for as long as the given cache of ions and electrical energy holds out. (with radium-radon there's a failsafe worth of 1600+ years before reaching half-life, so there's never a total lack of those Rn222 alpha/ions, and there's even some electron energy derived from the Radium-Rn breeder reactor) Given a sufficient cache of hefty ions and a sufficient onboard supply of electron energy for artificially accelerating and redirecting those ions into a narrow exit trajectory, and if this thrust is the direct result of a given ion flow rate or mass of whatever ion particles per second times the exit velocity squared, as then where's the insurmountable problem, other than your not standing anywhere behind those ion thrusters. Radon just so happens to make for a very good cache of substantially massive ions that are already quite active/reactive and supposedly going places as is, at roughly 1.63e7 m/sec. Liquid Radon or LRn222 represents a nifty fluid cache of a easily stored concentration of this Radon gas (though because of its short half-life it's still very much one of those use it or lose it substances, with possibly an extended life within a near solid 0 K storage), of which I believe this cache of Rn222 can be electrically induced or excited into exiting this ion thruster at a velocity as great as 0.1'c' (perhaps an exit velocity of 0.5'c' is technically doable if we're talking about a radon pumped laser cannon). Similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_eng...ColettiMPD.pdf Our lord all-knowing (aka World FactBook) Mook says; "Check it out" Here is how much thrust a rocket engine produces; F = mdot * Ve where mdot = mass flow rate, as kg/sec Ve = exhaust speed m/sec F = force (newtons) kg m/sec/sec Here is how much power a rocket engine's jet produces P = 1/2 * mdot * Ve^2 That is, the rate at which energy must be added to the exhaust jet is the kinetic energy of the parts. - - - - Of course this is not about any Mook passive alpha particle directing application, instead taking efficiency of the overall electrical and ion tossing system into account (such as thermal energy losses) adds to this existing amount of ion worth via applied electrical and magnetic energy that'll focus and accelerate those ions. So, it is not nearly as simple to express as one as Mook might suggest. However, at the notion of our getting rid of this initial tonne worth of our liquid cache of LRn222, at the ion mass flow rate of 1 kg/s, whereas the kinetic power or energy worth of thrust supposedly becomes: If the 1 kg/s flow of Rn ions and the exit Ve were made as great as 10%'c' = 3e7 m/s P = .5 * 9e14 = 4.5e14 kgf At utilizing this ion exit velocity of 0.1'c' (3e7 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using up one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of creating 4.5e14 kgf, of which this substance would push a 4.5e12 kg (4.5 gigatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to the gravity at the surface of Earth. At the more realistic ion exit velocity of 1% light speed is 0.01'c' (3e6 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of 4.5e12 kgf, of which would push a 4.5e10 kg (45 megatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to gravity at the surface of Earth. Of course the 45 megatonne spacecraft isn't hardly any more likely than human DNA or whatever spacecraft structurally surviving 100 gee. So, to start off with we'd likely have ourselves a whole lot smaller than 45 megatonne spacecraft, such as perhaps only as great as 4.5 megatonnes that'll exit away from Earth at perhaps as great as 10 gee, then once 10r (63,730 km and just 1% Earth gravity) is reached, whereas this is when the ion exit velocity could be safely punched up from 0.001'c' to 0.01'c', and eventually the maximum of 0.1'c' could be applied to as little as using a gram of Rn222 per second, because at 0.1'c' or better exit velocity is where you really do not require all that much mass flow per second. 0.1% light speed is 0.001'c' = 3e5 m/s 1 kg/sec at 3e5 m/s = .5 * 9e10 = 4.5e10 kgf 4.5e10 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 10 gee Using a gram/sec: 4.5e7 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 0.1 gee I believe that 1000 seconds of 10 gee acceleration is worth 78.4 km/s, though of course we'd be past the 10r of Earth within the first 600 seconds, and thereby able to ion whiz past that 78.4 km/s mark like it was standing still. This next part is often where my math takes yet another nose dive, but since I do not have the fly-by-rocket software and none others that claim as always being all-knowing are seldom willing to share, is why I'll just have to make do, especially since even the warm and fuzzy likes of Mook always takes the lowest road possible in order diminish and/or disqualify whatever isn't of his idea to start off with, excluding just enough of the good stuff in order to foil any further thought process. The required energy for a given thousand seconds worth of accelerating those Rn222 ions up to 3e5 m/s isn't exactly insignificant, demanding perhaps at least 245.2 GW.h (8.826 e14 J) for accommodating all 16.7 minutes worth of ion thrust. However, due to the overall efficiency of this energy transfer into accelerating those Rn ions is why it'll more than likely demand somewhat greater energy for accomplishing this task of tossing out the entire tonne worth those Rn222 alpha ions at the rate of one kg/s, even if that's initially accomplished at this minimal 0.001"c". However, since the existing Rn alpha particle velocity is already self motivated at 1.6e7 m/s(.054'c'), perhaps along with given another 5.6 MeV boost is where the required energy can be limited as to whatever's necessary for accomplishing a good exit focus or creating that laser cannon like beam, in which case the required ion thruster energy could become relatively minimal for accomplishing an impressive exit ion velocity of 3.26e7 m/s. At times this spacecraft is going to require a hole lot more electrical energy than any cache of Radium to Radon reactor could manage at 32 kw/Ra tonne, or even 320 kw/breeder Ra tonne. However, at a gross spacecraft mass of 4.5e6 tonnes, there's no problem with incorporating an h2o2/aluminum fuel cell of 100 GW.h capacity, or accommodating whatever Lithium nanotube ion battery storage, nuclear reactors or fusion alternatives. Once trekking off into interstellar space, and especially upon getting this craft past our nearest interstellar L1, and of the other gravity pulling us towards the likes of the relatively massive Sirius star/ solar system that we're already in blueshift as headed towards Sirius, as this is when as little as a mdot microgram/sec of Rn222 at the exit velocity of 0.2'c' would be more than sufficient ion thrust for continually accelerating this 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft towards the gravity pull of Sirius. For a one microgram/sec of Rn222 mdot at 0.2'c' example: P = .5e-9 * 3.6e15 = 1.5e6 kgf (1,500 tonnes/s of thrust, or in this case 0.000333 gee) The next problem gets down to the business of continually building up another cache of LRn from the Ra-Rn breeder reactor while on the fly, on behalf of that pesky matter of our having to ion retrothrust long before overshooting the intended target. At 4.5e9 kg, stopping this sucker that's by now going like a bat out of hell (possibly having reached 0.1'c') is going to take some doings. Of course, there would be generations of new and improved minds onboard in order to figure most of this out before arriving into the Sirius star/solar system, not to mention whatever could have been transmitted from Earth over the past century. BTW, at this point of topic argument sake, this mission to Sirius is a one way ticket to ride, with absolutely no travel package guaranties or ticket refunds allowed, because we may not be able to sufficiently retrothrust in order to save any of those brave souls, and a purely gravity-well trajectory turn-around or that of sufficiently aerobraking is at best iffy, although a substantial solar wind parachute as brake might eventually work. Also, recall the sheer size of these required ion thrust nacelles, as being somewhat Star Trek Enterprise like, and for all we know in need of those lithium crystals or perhaps lithium nanotubes as part of their function (after all, any good science fiction uses the regular laws of physics and the best available science, and for all we know lithium could still be part of it). . - Brad Guth
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#3
February 9th 08, 02:41 PM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
At least Robert Clark isn't against our use of ions for thrust, and of
notions for storing enough of such ions for creating a fairly substantial amount of volume sustained thrust if given the necessary energy for accelerating such ions is part of the package deal. Of course, I've had to correct those usual robo-moderated words as having been run together, so that a normal key word search would even turn up this "Stored ionized gas for ion drives" contribution of his, stating that such ion exhaust/exit shouldn't have any difficulties in obtaining 10,000 km/s. Whereas I'm thinking the 16.7e3 km/s of the natural 5.6 MeV radium alpha/ion particle itself is perhaps not half of what a electrostatic boosted and magnetic focused Rn222 ion could muster, therefore its potential exit velocity of 34,000 km/s (that's better than 0.1'c') seems entirely doable, and of the much greater mass of the Rn222 ion should by rights benefit the thrust potential without ignoring any of those laws of physics. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...ba7 8d45e7e1b From: Robert Clark Date: Sep 28 2007, 4:53 pm Subject: Stored ionized gas for ion drives. To: sci.space.policy, sci.astro, sci.physics, sci.physics.relativity, sci.physics.fusion On Sep 20, 4:47 pm, Robert Clark wrote: This page gives a formula for the exhaust speed of an ion engine in terms of the charge on the ions and the voltage driving the ion flow: Ionthruster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_usage The exhaust speed increases with the charge on the ions and decreases with their mass. You would think then that a light gas like hydrogen would be ideal since heavier gases even when fully ionized would still contain approximately equal numbers of neutrons as protons which would not contribute to the charge but would approximately double the mass. Yet it is the heavier gases like cesium and more recently xenon that are used. The explanation is that of the energy it takes to ionize the gas used as fuel. The figure on this page shows the energy to ionize a light gas such as hydrogen is relatively high compared to the heavier gases: Ionization Energies. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...al/ionize.html The figure gives the energy per mole which is high in itself. It is even worse when you consider this on a per mass basis since the mass amount of hydrogen would be so small compared to the amount of energy needed to ionize it. So could we instead store the hydrogen or some other light gas already in ionized form so we would not have to supply power to ionize the gas, only to accelerate it? If you used ionized hydrogen, so you would be accelerating protons, then using 6 x 10^18 protons to make one 1 Coulomb, and a mass of 1.6 x 10^-27 kg for a proton, and V representing the voltage in volts, the speed on the ions (protons) would be about (10^4)sqrt(2*V) in meters/ second. If we made the voltage be 5,000 V we would get 1,000,000 m/s speed much higher than any currentiondrive. Also, there are power supplies that convert low voltage high amperage power into high voltage, low amperage power, even up to 500,000 V. Then we could get 10,000,000 m/s = 10,000 km/s exhaust speed. The question is could we get light weight means of storing large amounts of ionized gas? Note that is this for space based propulsion not launch from Earth. You would have a possibly large energy generating station that remained in low Earth orbit to supply the power to ionize the gas once the spacecraft was placed in orbit. The power generator would be left behind in orbit. Then the volume of the gas container could be large to keep the density of the gas low. This would allow very thin container walls. Note the low density would also allow the electrostatic repulsion of the positively charged ions to be more easily constrained. A possible problem though is the charged ions contacting the walls could lead to a loss of ionization. You might be able to use a low level magnetic field to prevent the ions contacting the walls. Low density of the gas would insure the strength of the magnetic field required would be low. It might even be accomplished by thin permanent magnets so you would not need to use extra power. Some questions: what would be the electrostatic pressure produced by a low density highly ionized gas? What strength magnetic field would you need to contain it? Note that with an exhaust speed of say 10,000 km/s, by the rocket equation we could get the rocket itself up to relativistic speeds with acceptable mass ratios. Then this would provide a means of testing relativistic effects on macroscopic bodies. Bob Clark There is a lot of research on containing charged particles of only one charge, that is, all positive or all negative, because of fusion research. These are called "non-neutral" plasmas. There is a limit on the number of charged particles you can contain in a magnetic trap based on the strength of the magnetic field called the "Brillouin limit." However, some researchers have argued it is possible to exceed This limit: Confinement Of PureIonPlasma In A Cylindrical Current Sheet. http://www.pppl.gov/pub_report//2000/PPPL-3403.pdf Bob Clark Perhaps others might care to ponder and subsequently offer their best swag(scientific wild ass guess) as to our getting the most out of ion thrust, not that Ra226-Rn222 need be the one and only alternative. However, with that nearby and gamma saturated moon of ours might actually suggest there's a good amount of Radium to behold, and at a $1M/gram seems entirely worth going after, more so than whatever 3He. (why the hell not accomplish extracting both?) .. - Brad Guth On Feb 8, 7:59 am, BradGuth wrote: A good source of thruster ions that'll keep coming is from the likes of Radium that creates the Radon (Rn222) gas. Radium is somewhat rare, but it is not as an element uncommon. However, of what's most uncommon is any public disclosures or education about Radium. Apparently the element of Radium is officially taboo/nondisclosure rated, especially as far as to who has what and at whatever current market value. Essentially, this need-to-know market price of Radium is at least a thousand fold more government cartel hocus-pocus price fixed than anything of fossil fuels or even of yellowcake, though the formal extraction process of obtaining roughly 100 milligrams per yellowcake tonne is essentially a robotic task from start to finish. For the most part, Radium is actually another one of those discarded elements within spent nuclear fuel, as well as found at less concentrations within most mineral tailings or otherwise given as a slight part of most all fossil fuels, that which the fossil energy industry as a whole do not bother to extract or otherwise divert this element from the subsequent CO2/Nox laced combustion soot, much of which simply goes either directly into our atmosphere or if in full clean-air compliance merely gets relocated into various landfills that'll eventually end up eroding and/or blending back into the general environment. Of course none of the valuable 3He has been collected either, so what the hell. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM)http://www.eoearth.org/article/Natur...oactive_materi...) A great amount of Radium and subsequently Radon comes into our surface environment though fossil fuel extractions and subsequent usage, and much of whatever's initially kept from being atmospherically dispersed as CO2 and NOx contaminated soot that's laced with a slight trace of Radium is simply buried in relatively shallow graves or in some cases utilized as fill for open pit mining site recovery. In other words, most all of the mined elements of radioactive fuel that used to be safely sequestered far enough underground, essentially away from our frail DNA and surface environment, has been systematically and artificially reintroduced into our life sustaining environment, along with as little public education as possible so that folks are simply snookered into being unaware of these surrounding concentrations and dosage levels that we all have to cope within. Radon gas; "reportedly causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States alone."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon If that be the case, then by any global/world standard could be looking at as many as 400,000 Radon gas related deaths per year, if not an all-inclusive 500,000 in radiation contamination related deaths per year (keeping in mind that fewer than 500 pandemic deaths per year would become a world health alert with multiple quarantines imposed). Therefore, rounding up as much of the spare/surplus Radium as possible seems like a perfectly good sort of task worth doing, so that it can be either put safely away or at least properly utilized in a manner that doesn't further traumatize our frail DNA and badly failing environment any more than absolutely necessary. Like U238 yellowcake of 80% grade, whereas perhaps the 100 mg/tonne of 90~97% extracted grade of this refined Radium ore doesn't amount to all that much by volume, but clearly what there is of it has become extremely valuable as well as humanly lethal if continually ignored as is, not to mention what adverse affects are imposed upon all other plant, animal and microbe forms of life that surrounds and benefits us, and in one way or another gets involved and/or consumed by us humans. Radium is roughly 60 fold more radioactive than Uranium, is also of at least 6 million fold greater worth per equal weight, and obviously the extremely active Radon(Rn222) decay element is flying right off the charts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Colorado "Although no more than a trace of radium was present in the ore, newly discovered medical applications had made radium worth $100 per milligram, making the radium in the carnotite ore worth much more than the vanadium or uranium." (however, we're also talking of those extremely old dollars worth better than twenty fold of our current dollar that's not exactly floating) As of 1940, Radium was made artificially worth as little as $25/ milligram, and as of today our American medical cartel inflated value of pure Radium metal is always floating closer to whatever the market or cancer patient will bare, such as $175/milligram (that's actually relatively dirt cheap compared to what it used to cost in those old hard earned dollars of nearly a century ago), and with the market price of yellowcake about to reach $1000/kg within this next decade is only suggesting that the rare element within of Radium will likely be in hot pursuit of exceeding the $1000/milligram mark. In the World there's roughly 100 kg of medical Radium hording (not including secret amounts held by various governments and of private speculation hording), and because this Radium salt or metallic alloy can be utilized over and over thousands of times, and also because of its given artificial cartel market value is why this element is most always fully recovered per usage, and as such there's way more than enough to go around for medical applications, along with more on its way for those capable of paying the price, because it can be extracted on demand. Radium chloride (bromide salt) is less costly to produce or extract from spent nuclear fuel, than having to create a pure metallic Radium alloy, but because so many NRC and the medical cartel folks like to live large, it'll likely still costs you about $500/milligram and even if need be marked up from there so that their normal 10:1 profit margins don't suffer. (actually that profit margin is in excess of a 1000:1 if you take into account how many times the same substance gets reused and thus resold over and over) http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...9A01E5DD1E38E6... The previous Radium cartel market price had once upon a time been as great as $160,000/gram, and again that was in old 1930 dollars that were actually worth something. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...758086,00.html Monday, Aug. 09, 1937 "A rich radium deposit is one which yields 90 to 120 milligrams (.00315 to .0042 oz.) nearly pure radium bromide salt per ton of concentrated ore (50 tons of crude ore). From ore bodies of such richness in northwestern Canada the refining plant is able to extract one gram of commercially pure radium from 550 tons of mined ore. A San Diego mining engineer and chemist named F. S. Kearney, now working in Mexico, assayed Mrs. Bishop's ore at 130 milligrams of radium per ton. This high figure, Mrs. Bishop said, was confirmed when she sent a sample to the Institut de Radium in Paris (once presided over by the late Marie Curie). Present price of radium is $25 per milligram, $25,000 per gram, $700,000 per ounce. Mrs. Bishop suspected for years that she had radium ore on her property, kept it quiet until her claim was cleared in the courts. Last week the excited little woman did not know just how extensive her deposit was, but she and her lawyers laid plans for a thorough survey and hoped to write a new chapter in the shifting course of world radium production." Just another interesting matter of a good ion generating fact about smoke detectors: "one Am-241 emitted alpha particle will produce 150,000 ions", so perhaps other than Radium-226 that'll gradually yield to becoming Rn222, as such can instead be put to good use on behalf of feeding large scale ion thrusters. There's actually quite a good amount of Radium226 to behold (because it's what ever so gradually makes Radon gas, and there's lots of Rn222 to go around), although most of this Radium has not been systematically collected or much less isolated from our environment, even though it's extremely valuable. Never the less it's still not getting officially rounded up at more than 1% of what's otherwise getting artificially diverted into our badly failing environment, and perhaps that's the real reason why so little information is published as to the natural and artificially established inventory of Radium, much of which is held within existing inventories of yellowcake, in weapons grade and spent nuclear fuel that no one on Earth seems to want anything to with unless getting paid hundreds of billions of our hard earned loot up front. Via fossil fuel explorations, extractions and various forms of consumption is where much of the naturally occurring Radium has found its way into our polluted surface and oceans of growing dead zone environments, and oddly there's still no technical plan or even spin of action for collecting this element of Radium that's associated within such fossil fuels and various mineral tailings. Much like our FEMA in action, the lethal and whatever valued energy related aspects of Radium is only getting studied to death, though mostly on behalf of product hording and cover-thy-butt protecting, for making damn certain that no one in government or corporate whatever can ever be held accountable. (perhaps they'll end up blaming everything on Marie Curie, if not Muslims). At any rate, the extremely active element of Radium is quite interesting and valuable in far more ways than most realize or are being allowed to learn about. Whenever I mention the use of Radium is when the Usenet lights usually go out, and I can here that door slamming shut. It's almost as taboo/nondisclosure rated as for asking where the hell that planet Venus was hiding throughout all of those NASA/Apollo years. Go figure. Since the Ux U3O8 (aka yellowcake) was recently worth nearly $310/kg as of June 2007, and is currently hovering at the subsidized mark ... read more
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#4
March 5th 08, 10:13 PM
posted to sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy,sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
On Feb 9, 6:41*am, BradGuth wrote:
At least Robert Clark isn't against our use of ions for thrust, and of notions for storing enough of such ions for creating a fairly substantial amount of volume sustained thrust if given the necessary energy for accelerating such ions is part of the package deal. *Of course, I've had to correct those usual robo-moderated words as having been run together, so that a normal key word search would even turn up this "Stored ionized gas for ion drives" contribution of his, stating that such ion exhaust/exit shouldn't have any difficulties in obtaining 10,000 km/s. *Whereas I'm thinking the 16.7e3 km/s of the natural 5.6 MeV radium alpha/ion particle itself is perhaps not half of what a electrostatic boosted and magnetic focused Rn222 ion could muster, therefore its potential exit velocity of 34,000 km/s (that's better than 0.1'c') seems entirely doable, and of the much greater mass of the Rn222 ion should by rights benefit the thrust potential without ignoring any of those laws of physics. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...frm/thread/109... From: Robert Clark Date: Sep 28 2007, 4:53 pm Subject: *Stored ionized gas for ion drives. To:sci.space.policy, sci.astro, sci.physics, sci.physics.relativity, sci.physics.fusion On Sep 20, 4:47 pm, Robert Clark wrote: *This page gives a formula for the exhaust speed of an ion engine in terms of the charge on the ions and the voltage driving the ion flow: Ionthruster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_usage *The exhaust speed increases with the charge on the ions and decreases with their mass. You would think then that a light gas like hydrogen would be ideal since heavier gases even when fully ionized would still contain approximately equal numbers of neutrons as protons which would not contribute to the charge but would approximately double the mass. *Yet it is the heavier gases like cesium and more recently xenon that are used. The explanation is that of the energy it takes to ionize the gas used as fuel. The figure on this page shows the energy to ionize a light gas such as hydrogen is relatively high compared to the heavier gases: Ionization Energies. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...al/ionize.html *The figure gives the energy per mole which is high in itself. It is even worse when you consider this on a per mass basis since the mass amount of hydrogen would be so small compared to the amount of energy needed to ionize it. *So could we instead store the hydrogen or some other light gas already in ionized form so we would not have to supply power to ionize the gas, only to accelerate it? *If you used ionized hydrogen, so you would be accelerating protons, then using 6 x 10^18 protons to make one 1 Coulomb, and a mass of 1.6 x 10^-27 kg for a proton, and V representing the voltage in volts, the speed on the ions (protons) would be about (10^4)sqrt(2*V) in meters/ second. *If we made the voltage be 5,000 V we would get 1,000,000 m/s speed much higher than any currentiondrive. Also, there are power supplies that convert low voltage high amperage power into high voltage, low amperage power, even up to 500,000 V. Then we could get 10,000,000 m/s = 10,000 km/s exhaust speed. *The question is could we get light weight means of storing large amounts of ionized gas? Note that is this for space based propulsion not launch from Earth. You would have a possibly large energy generating station that remained in low Earth orbit to supply the power to ionize the gas once the spacecraft was placed in orbit. The power generator would be left behind in orbit. Then the volume of the gas container could be large to keep the density of the gas low. This would allow very thin container walls. Note the low density would also allow the electrostatic repulsion of the positively charged ions to be more easily constrained. *A possible problem though is the charged ions contacting the walls could lead to a loss of ionization. You might be able to use a low level magnetic field to prevent the ions contacting the walls. Low density of the gas would insure the strength of the magnetic field required would be low. It might even be accomplished by thin permanent magnets so you would not need to use extra power. *Some questions: what would be the electrostatic pressure produced by a low density highly ionized gas? What strength magnetic field would you need to contain it? *Note that with an exhaust speed of say 10,000 km/s, by the rocket equation we could get the rocket itself up to relativistic speeds with acceptable mass ratios. *Then this would provide a means of testing relativistic effects on *macroscopic bodies. * *Bob Clark There is a lot of research on containing charged particles of only one charge, that is, all positive or all negative, because of fusion research. These are called "non-neutral" plasmas. There is a limit on the number of charged particles you can contain in a magnetic trap based on the strength of the magnetic field called the "Brillouin limit." However, some researchers have argued it is possible to exceed This limit: Confinement Of PureIonPlasma In A Cylindrical Current Sheet. http://www.pppl.gov/pub_report//2000/PPPL-3403.pdf *Bob Clark Perhaps others might care to ponder and subsequently offer their best swag(scientific wild ass guess) as to our getting the most out of ion thrust, not that Ra226-Rn222 need be the one and only alternative. However, with that nearby and gamma saturated moon of ours might actually suggest there's a good amount of Radium to behold, and at a $1M/gram seems entirely worth going after, more so than whatever 3He. (why the hell not accomplish extracting both?) . - Brad Guth On Feb 8, 7:59 am, BradGuth wrote: A good source of thruster ions that'll keep coming is from the likes of Radium that creates the Radon (Rn222) gas. *Radium is somewhat rare, but it is not as an element uncommon. *However, of what's most uncommon is any public disclosures or education about Radium. Apparently the element of Radium is officially taboo/nondisclosure rated, especially as far as to who has what and at whatever current market value. *Essentially, this need-to-know market price of Radium is at least a thousand fold more government cartel hocus-pocus price fixed than anything of fossil fuels or even of yellowcake, though the formal extraction process of obtaining roughly 100 milligrams per yellowcake tonne is essentially a robotic task from start to finish. For the most part, Radium is actually another one of those discarded elements within spent nuclear fuel, as well as found at less concentrations within most mineral tailings or otherwise given as a slight part of most all fossil fuels, that which the fossil energy industry as a whole do not bother to extract or otherwise divert this element from the subsequent CO2/Nox laced combustion soot, much of which simply goes either directly into our atmosphere or if in full clean-air compliance merely gets relocated into various landfills that'll eventually end up eroding and/or blending back into the general environment. *Of course none of the valuable 3He has been collected either, so what the hell. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM)http://www.eoearth.org/article/Natur...oactive_materi...) A *great amount of Radium and subsequently Radon comes into our surface environment though fossil fuel extractions and subsequent usage, and much of whatever's initially kept from being atmospherically dispersed as CO2 and NOx contaminated soot that's laced with a slight trace of Radium is simply buried in relatively shallow graves or in some cases utilized as fill for open pit mining site recovery. *In other words, most all of the mined elements of radioactive fuel that used to be safely sequestered far enough underground, essentially away from our frail DNA and surface environment, has been systematically and artificially reintroduced into our life sustaining environment, along with as little public education as possible so that folks are simply snookered into being unaware of these surrounding concentrations and dosage levels that we all have to cope within. Radon gas; "reportedly causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States alone."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radon If that be the case, then by any global/world standard could be looking at as many as 400,000 Radon gas related deaths per year, if not an all-inclusive 500,000 in radiation contamination related deaths per year (keeping in mind that fewer than 500 pandemic deaths per year would become a world health alert with multiple quarantines imposed). Therefore, rounding up as much of the spare/surplus Radium as possible seems like a perfectly good sort of task worth doing, so that it can be either put safely away or at least properly utilized in a manner that doesn't further traumatize our frail DNA and badly failing environment any more than absolutely necessary. *Like U238 yellowcake of 80% grade, whereas perhaps the 100 mg/tonne of 90~97% extracted grade of this refined Radium ore doesn't amount to all that much by volume, but clearly what there is of it has become extremely valuable as well as humanly lethal if continually ignored as is, not to mention what adverse affects are imposed upon all other plant, animal and microbe forms of life that surrounds and benefits us, and in one way or another gets involved and/or consumed by us humans. Radium is roughly 60 fold more radioactive than Uranium, is also of at least 6 million fold greater worth per ... read more »- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - I don't know what the big deal is about keeping ionic propulsion top secret. The cold war has been over for some time and the Communists propably invented them before we did anyway. Its not that complicated. You take the guts out of a microwave oven, mount a parabolic reflector behing the tube so that it concentrate the mocrowave energy into a point inject a little water into that point at the same time you push the thrust button and volia you have thrust. When you run out of water you can stick just about anything in there and it will ionize it. When you are close enough to other star sstems for yoursolar cells to work you will ionic propulsion. You would think it was rocket science! I lived twelve miles north of Cape Canaveral and watched Werner Von Brun's team put the first satellite in orbit. We owned two large parcels of land and they kicked everybody off Merit Island so that they could pretend to put men on the Moon. Ionic propulsion has been around before the cold war. When I was twelve Popular Science and National Geographic both showed pictures of gold plated ion rocket cubes attached to satellites with five nozzels pointing in five diferent directions controlled by a solonoid valve for manovering purposes. They even had manually controlled ones for the astronauts operated by a four-way toggle switch. When I was going to college whenever I would mention ionic propulsion the teacher would clam up. When I would aske anyone from NASA or JPL about ion engines they would clam up and give me strange look. Ionic propulsion is the only way we move around in space using conventional technology. Until we have mass reduction technology and can alter time and warp space (some of us can already do this) we have to stick with what works. What I have been working on lately is mutural gravity alignment bubbles between multiple star systems. Using our conventional ionic propulsion technology we might be able to sustain 1/10 earth gravity acceleration so there would be fairly large spaces between stars where a spaceship could navigate using ionic propulsion. If you went outside this envelop you would have to use your rocket power to get back in. In a real dire emergency you would have to use nuclear to get back into the safe zones. At the present time mankind has the coputational capability to create three dimensional maps of the mutural gravity points dictated by the capability of our ionic propulsion rockets. Teh software already exists but they won't let us use it. The Berkley-JPL Labritory has a 2048 CPU with terrabites of memory but us common folk aren't allowed to use it even though we paid for it. Those of you who have an inkling of what Brad and I are talking about know that our sun reached a mutural gravity point at apogee about ten to twelve thousand years ago in its orbit around the Sirius system and we (our sun) is traveling (accelerating) toward Sirius A & B at 7.5 kilometer per second. We (our sun) exists in an oblong star cluster of 100 stars about 15 light years by 100 light years ruled by two the giants Sirius and Procyon which are several billion years older than our sun. We obviously didn't come from the same place. Our sun was born in Orion--a birthing place for stars 1330 light years to the south. Both Sirius and Procyon have white dwarfs with masses larger than our sun. Sirius A and B is the object that started advance multicellular life forms on Earth. Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 54 years. There are many other larger star clusters around us; some containing 2500 stars. To make a very long story short after our sun was born in Orion with about 40 other stars. The planets formed from extra material and we drifted out away from Orion for three billion years. Earth had a 1450 pound per square inch atmosphere and 1/3 of it was CO2. Earth had an Ice Age that lasted over a billion years and finally we drifted between Procyon and Sirius into a mutural gravity alignment point. Sirius B with 1.5 solar masses that orbits Sirius A every 54 years came around and put our Sun into orbit around Sirius while our sister stars kept going and are in a much larger orbit. The aditional light and heat from these very old stars took Earth out of it's billion-year-long ice age and the intense light from Sirius B which puts out from 100 to 1000 times more UV than our sun started plants growning on the surface of the oceans. It took the intense light from a neutron or white dwarf to penetrate earth's 1450 pound per square inch atmosphere and start laying down coal, oil and limesone with plant growth. 650-million years of this took earth's atmospher down to 14.5 pound per square inch giving us free oxygen, coal, oil and limestone. You can't drive a car without a neutron star! You can read the entire book in a couple months by ordering it from Trafford of Victoria British Columbia, Amazon.com Boarders, Bokers Etc., Etc. You can read a dsylexic version of it right now by going to my web site www.alaskapublishing.com. It can be downloaded for $4.00. I got my directions backward in regards to which way we are heading for Sirius. The mainstream information I have to work with is not that good. The book itself will be awsome with over twenty wonderful, full-page, full-color images and graphs. WWW.ALASKAPUBLISHING.COM BEST WISHES, HANK
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#5
March 5th 08, 10:47 PM
posted to sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy,sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
You can always post on top portion of the given reply, as that way
your text isn't hidden off-page. And you don't always have to include the entire body of other text if you'd like keeping the given reply more readable by those dropping in for a quick look-see. Ion propulsion or ion thrusters are becoming the ultimate alternative for the future of faster and more extended space travels, although the usual topic taboo or nondisclosure nature of this Usenet and of most other web forums is truly impressive, as in don't ask and don't tell, or else they'll kick our butts. Of second to ion propulsion is gravity, and big nasty star/solar systems do tend to pull upon whatever is on their side of the interstellar L1, especially if such an item as a spacecraft or robotic probe were getting ion thrusted towards that given star at even as little as 0.000001 Gee. BTW, they supposedly don't much care for a direct sales pitch of items within Usenet, but compared to everything else they allow, what the hell. Giving a link to an external web page of items for sale might be a little safer bet. .. - Brad Guth On Mar 5, 2:13 pm, Hank Kroll wrote: I don't know what the big deal is about keeping ionic propulsion top secret. The cold war has been over for some time and the Communists propably invented them before we did anyway. Its not that complicated. You take the guts out of a microwave oven, mount a parabolic reflector behing the tube so that it concentrate the mocrowave energy into a point inject a little water into that point at the same time you push the thrust button and volia you have thrust. When you run out of water you can stick just about anything in there and it will ionize it. When you are close enough to other star sstems for yoursolar cells to work you will ionic propulsion. You would think it was rocket science! I lived twelve miles north of Cape Canaveral and watched Werner Von Brun's team put the first satellite in orbit. We owned two large parcels of land and they kicked everybody off Merit Island so that they could pretend to put men on the Moon. Ionic propulsion has been around before the cold war. When I was twelve Popular Science and National Geographic both showed pictures of gold plated ion rocket cubes attached to satellites with five nozzels pointing in five diferent directions controlled by a solonoid valve for manovering purposes. They even had manually controlled ones for the astronauts operated by a four-way toggle switch. When I was going to college whenever I would mention ionic propulsion the teacher would clam up. When I would aske anyone from NASA or JPL about ion engines they would clam up and give me strange look. Ionic propulsion is the only way we move around in space using conventional technology. Until we have mass reduction technology and can alter time and warp space (some of us can already do this) we have to stick with what works. What I have been working on lately is mutural gravity alignment bubbles between multiple star systems. Using our conventional ionic propulsion technology we might be able to sustain 1/10 earth gravity acceleration so there would be fairly large spaces between stars where a spaceship could navigate using ionic propulsion. If you went outside this envelop you would have to use your rocket power to get back in. In a real dire emergency you would have to use nuclear to get back into the safe zones. At the present time mankind has the coputational capability to create three dimensional maps of the mutural gravity points dictated by the capability of our ionic propulsion rockets. Teh software already exists but they won't let us use it. The Berkley-JPL Labritory has a 2048 CPU with terrabites of memory but us common folk aren't allowed to use it even though we paid for it. Those of you who have an inkling of what Brad and I are talking about know that our sun reached a mutural gravity point at apogee about ten to twelve thousand years ago in its orbit around the Sirius system and we (our sun) is traveling (accelerating) toward Sirius A & B at 7.5 kilometer per second. We (our sun) exists in an oblong star cluster of 100 stars about 15 light years by 100 light years ruled by two the giants Sirius and Procyon which are several billion years older than our sun. We obviously didn't come from the same place. Our sun was born in Orion--a birthing place for stars 1330 light years to the south. Both Sirius and Procyon have white dwarfs with masses larger than our sun. Sirius A and B is the object that started advance multicellular life forms on Earth. Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 54 years. There are many other larger star clusters around us; some containing 2500 stars. To make a very long story short after our sun was born in Orion with about 40 other stars. The planets formed from extra material and we drifted out away from Orion for three billion years. Earth had a 1450 pound per square inch atmosphere and 1/3 of it was CO2. Earth had an Ice Age that lasted over a billion years and finally we drifted between Procyon and Sirius into a mutural gravity alignment point. Sirius B with 1.5 solar masses that orbits Sirius A every 54 years came around and put our Sun into orbit around Sirius while our sister stars kept going and are in a much larger orbit. The aditional light and heat from these very old stars took Earth out of it's billion-year-long ice age and the intense light from Sirius B which puts out from 100 to 1000 times more UV than our sun started plants growning on the surface of the oceans. It took the intense light from a neutron or white dwarf to penetrate earth's 1450 pound per square inch atmosphere and start laying down coal, oil and limesone with plant growth. 650-million years of this took earth's atmospher down to 14.5 pound per square inch giving us free oxygen, coal, oil and limestone. You can't drive a car without a neutron star! You can read the entire book in a couple months by ordering it from Trafford of Victoria British Columbia, Amazon.com Boarders, Bokers Etc., Etc. You can read a dsylexic version of it right now by going to my web sitewww.alaskapublishing.com. It can be downloaded for $4.00. I got my directions backward in regards to which way we are heading for Sirius. The mainstream information I have to work with is not that good. The book itself will be awsome with over twenty wonderful, full-page, full-color images and graphs. WWW.ALASKAPUBLISHING.COM BEST WISHES, HANK
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#6
February 11th 08, 06:47 PM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
Hmmm, seems we can't even honestly rant about ion thrusting for the
fun of it all. Go figure, even though ion thrusters that reliably and efficiently work according to those pesky laws of physics are currently rather small, there's no good reason(s) as to why they can't be made as terribly huge and extremely powerful. Of course, it would be nice having my LSE-CM/ISS as our space depot/ gateway or outpost oasis for the assembly of such nifty spaceships with those big ion thrusters, but then that's also technically doable. .. - Brad Guth
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#7
February 13th 08, 05:15 AM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
On Feb 11, 10:47 am, BradGuth wrote:
Hmmm, seems we can't even honestly rant about ion thrusting for the fun of it all. Go figure, even though ion thrusters that reliably and efficiently work according to those pesky laws of physics are currently rather small, there's no good reason(s) as to why they can't be made as terribly huge and extremely powerful. Of course, it would be nice having my LSE-CM/ISS as our space depot/ gateway or outpost oasis for the assembly of such nifty spaceships with those big ion thrusters, but then that's also technically doable. . - Brad Guth as of "Feb 11 by BradGuth - 11 messages - 6 authors" So, why are these other "6 authors" hiding form sci.space.history? .. - Brad Guth
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#8
February 13th 08, 05:27 AM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
This is rather odd: The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to
Sirius "Feb 11 by BradGuth - 11 messages - 6 authors" So, where exactly are these other 5 authors hiding out, if not posting into any of the following groups? sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle, alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle Are the Usenet moderator bots hard at work (removing whatever they don't like), or what? .. - Brad Guth BradGuth wrote: What if instead of our going with whatever's small, extremely cheap, fast and rad-hard robotic, what if going with larger is nearly always better? Perhaps this new and improved topic of "Building Spaceships" for accommodating us frail humans on interstellar treks, and of those multi generation habitat spacecraft being extensively ion thrusted, along with the wizardly help of William Mook and those few of us unafraid of whatever's out there, as such may be a little easier said than done, not to mention folks having to deal with my dyslexic encryption and frequent typos that can't always manage to keep those numbers or terminology half straight. Perhaps such a large scale ion thrusted spacecraft isn't quite as insurmountable as we've been told, and it's not that a pair or quad worth of substantial LRBs would not have to help get this rather substantial package off the pad (in modules if need be, and assembled at the moon's L1). However, upon launch and of once reaching the cool upper most atmosphere is where the potential of ion thrusting could start to contribute w/o Radon saturating Earth in the process, and obviously from whatever LEO point onward is where the real potential of ion thrust becomes impressive, especially since this method of electro-rocket thrust can be sustained for as long as the given cache of ions and electrical energy holds out. (with radium-radon there's a failsafe worth of 1600+ years before reaching half-life, so there's never a total lack of those Rn222 alpha/ions, and there's even some electron energy derived from the Radium-Rn breeder reactor) Given a sufficient cache of hefty ions and a sufficient onboard supply of electron energy for artificially accelerating and redirecting those ions into a narrow exit trajectory, and if this thrust is the direct result of a given ion flow rate or mass of whatever ion particles per second times the exit velocity squared, as then where's the insurmountable problem, other than your not standing anywhere behind those ion thrusters. Radon just so happens to make for a very good cache of substantially massive ions that are already quite active/reactive and supposedly going places as is, at roughly 1.63e7 m/sec. Liquid Radon or LRn222 represents a nifty fluid cache of a easily stored concentration of Radon gas (though because of its short half-life it's still very much one of those use it or lose it substances, with possibly an extended life within a near solid 0 K storage), of which I believe this cache of Rn222 can be electrically induced or excited into exiting this ion thruster at a velocity as great as 0.1'c' (perhaps an exit velocity of 0.5'c' is technically doable if we're talking about a radon pumped laser cannon). Similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_engines , http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/47966/01/paperColettiMPD.pdf Our lord all-knowing (aka World FactBook) Mook says; "Check it out" Here is how much thrust a rocket engine produces; F = mdot * Ve where mdot = mass flow rate, as kg/sec Ve = exhaust speed m/sec F = force (newtons) kg m/sec/sec Here is how much power a rocket engine's jet produces P = 1/2 * mdot * Ve^2 That is, the rate at which energy must be added to the exhaust jet is the kinetic energy of the parts. - - - - Of course this is not about any Mook passive alpha particle directing application, instead taking efficiency of the overall electrical and ion tossing system into account (such as thermal energy losses) adds to this existing amount of ion worth via applied electrical and magnetic energy that'll focus and accelerate those ions. So, it is not nearly as simple to express as one as Mook might suggest. However, at the notion of our getting rid of this initial tonne worth of our liquid cache of LRn222, at the ion mass flow rate of 1 kg/s, whereas the kinetic power or energy worth of thrust supposedly becomes: If the 1 kg/s flow of Rn ions and the exit Ve were made as great as 10%'c' = 3e7 m/s P = .5 * 9e14 = 4.5e14 kgf At utilizing this ion exit velocity of 0.1'c' (3e7 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using up one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of creating 4.5e14 kgf, of which this substance would push a 4.5e12 kg (4.5 gigatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to the gravity at the surface of Earth. At the more realistic ion exit velocity of 1% light speed is 0.01'c' (3e6 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of 4.5e12 kgf, of which would push a 4.5e10 kg (45 megatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to gravity at the surface of Earth. Of course the 45 megatonne spacecraft isn't hardly any more likely than human DNA or whatever spacecraft structurally surviving 100 gee. So, to start off with we'd likely have ourselves a whole lot smaller than 45 megatonne spacecraft, such as perhaps only as great as 4.5 megatonnes that'll exit away from Earth at perhaps as great as 10 gee, then once 10r (63,730 km and just 1% Earth gravity) is reached, whereas this is when the ion exit velocity could be safely punched up from 0.001'c' to 0.01'c', and eventually the maximum of 0.1'c' could be applied to as little as using a gram of Rn222 per second, because at 0.1'c' or better exit velocity is where you really do not require all that much mass flow per second. 0.1% light speed is 0.001'c' = 3e5 m/s 1 kg/sec at 3e5 m/s = .5 * 9e10 = 4.5e10 kgf 4.5e10 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 10 gee Using a gram/sec: 4.5e7 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 0.1 gee I believe that 1000 seconds of 10 gee acceleration is worth 78.4 km/s, though of course we'd be past the 10r of Earth within the first 600 seconds, and thereby able to ion whiz past that 78.4 km/s mark like it was standing still. This next part is often where my math takes yet another nose dive, but since I do not have the fly-by-rocket software and none others that claim as always being all-knowing are seldom willing to share, is why I'll just have to make do, especially since even the warm and fuzzy likes of Mook always takes the lowest road possible in order diminish and/or disqualify whatever isn't of his idea to start off with, excluding just enough of the good stuff in order to foil any further thought process. The required energy for a given thousand seconds worth of accelerating those Rn222 ions up to 3e5 m/s isn't exactly insignificant, demanding perhaps at least 245.2 GW.h (8.826 e14 J) for accommodating all 16.7 minutes worth of ion thrust. However, due to the overall efficiency of this energy transfer into accelerating those Rn ions is why it'll more than likely demand somewhat greater energy for accomplishing this task of tossing out the entire tonne worth those Rn222 alpha ions at the rate of one kg/s, even if that's initially accomplished at this minimal 0.001"c". However, since the existing Rn alpha particle velocity is already self motivated at 1.6e7 m/s(.054'c'), perhaps along with given another 5.6 MeV boost is where the required energy can be limited as to whatever's necessary for accomplishing a good exit focus or creating that laser cannon like beam, in which case the required ion thruster energy could become relatively minimal for accomplishing an impressive exit ion velocity of 3.26e7 m/s. At times this spacecraft is going to require a hole lot more electrical energy than any cache of Radium to Radon reactor could manage at 32 kw/Ra tonne, or even 320 kw/breeder Ra tonne. However, at a gross spacecraft mass of 4.5e6 tonnes, there's no problem with incorporating an h2o2/aluminum fuel cell of 100 GW.h capacity, or accommodating whatever Lithium nanotube ion battery storage, nuclear reactors or fusion alternatives. Once trekking off into interstellar space, and especially upon getting this craft past our nearest interstellar L1, and of the other gravity pulling us towards the likes of the relatively massive Sirius star/ solar system that we're already in blueshift as headed towards Sirius, as this is when as little as a mdot microgram/sec of Rn222 at the exit velocity of 0.2'c' would be more than sufficient ion thrust for continually accelerating this 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft towards the gravity pull of Sirius. For a one microgram/sec of Rn222 mdot at 0.2'c' example: P = .5e-9 * 3.6e15 = 1.5e6 kgf (1,500 tonnes/s of thrust, or in this case 0.000333 gee) The next problem gets down to the business of continually building up another cache of LRn from the Ra-Rn breeder reactor while on the fly, on behalf of that pesky matter of our having to ion retrothrust long before overshooting the intended target. At 4.5e9 kg, stopping this sucker that's by now going like a bat out of hell (possibly having reached 0.1'c') is going to take some doings. Of course, there would be generations of new and improved minds onboard in order to figure most of this out before arriving into the Sirius star/solar system, not to mention whatever could have been transmitted from Earth over the past century. BTW, at this point of topic argument sake, this mission to Sirius is a one way ticket to ride, with absolutely no travel package guaranties or ticket refunds allowed, because we may not be able to sufficiently retrothrust in order to save any of those brave souls, and a purely gravity-well trajectory turn-around or that of sufficiently aerobraking is at best iffy, although a substantial solar wind parachute as brake might eventually work. Also, recall the sheer size of these required ion thrust nacelles, as being somewhat Star Trek Enterprise like, and for all we know in need of those lithium crystals or perhaps lithium nanotubes as part of their function (after all, any good science fiction uses the regular laws of physics and the best available science, and for all we know lithium could still be part of it). . - Brad Guth
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#9
February 13th 08, 02:55 PM
posted to sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
Apparently I'm on the right track about more than is permitted by the
Gods of Usenet. Something about an ion thruster using a breeder pumped cache on behalf of Ra226 that'll make Rn222 as a reliable supply of fast moving ions capable of 0.1'c' or better exit velocity, is obviously pushing more of those do-not-push buttons. If not Ra226- Rn222, then perhaps any number of other fast moving ions via radioactive substances seems doable, whereas the required energy of diverting and focus of such active ions seems rather efficient, especially if they are laser cannon pumped into such a narrow focus. "Feb 11 by BradGuth - 13 messages - 6 authors" As of somewhere within all of sci.space.history, sci.space.policy, sci.space.shuttle, alt.astronomy, sci.physics.particle indicates that a few authors had been contributing to this topic of "The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius", but lo and behold something else has been extracting those contributions of these authors, somewhat like my email being continually screwed with. If you're one of those five attempting to contribute, but wondering as to why I'm not replying to your message, and the same goes for my email, then don't blame me because, I'll always read and reply to whom ever's constructively contributing to the topic. .. - Brad Guth On Feb 7, 10:40 am, BradGuth wrote: What if instead of our going with whatever's small, extremely cheap, fast and rad-hard robotic, what if going with larger is nearly always better? Perhaps this new and improved topic of "Building Spaceships" for accommodating us frail humans on interstellar treks, and of those multi generation habitat spacecraft being extensively ion thrusted, along with the wizardly help of William Mook and those few of us unafraid of whatever's out there, as such may be a little easier said than done, not to mention folks having to deal with my dyslexic encryption and frequent typos that can't always manage to keep those numbers or terminology half straight. Perhaps such a large scale ion thrusted spacecraft isn't quite as insurmountable as we've been told, and it's not that a pair or quad worth of substantial LRBs would not have to help get this rather substantial package off the pad (in modules if need be, and assembled at the moon's L1). However, upon launch and of once reaching the cool upper most atmosphere is where the potential of ion thrusting could start to contribute w/o Radon saturating Earth in the process, and obviously from whatever LEO point onward is where the real potential of ion thrust becomes impressive, especially since this method of electro-rocket thrust can be sustained for as long as the given cache of ions and electrical energy holds out. (with radium-radon there's a failsafe worth of 1600+ years before reaching half-life, so there's never a total lack of those Rn222 alpha/ions, and there's even some electron energy derived from the Radium-Rn breeder reactor) Given a sufficient cache of hefty ions and a sufficient onboard supply of electron energy for artificially accelerating and redirecting those ions into a narrow exit trajectory, and if this thrust is the direct result of a given ion flow rate or mass of whatever ion particles per second times the exit velocity squared, as then where's the insurmountable problem, other than your not standing anywhere behind those ion thrusters. Radon just so happens to make for a very good cache of substantially massive ions that are already quite active/reactive and supposedly going places as is, at roughly 1.63e7 m/sec. Liquid Radon or LRn222 represents a nifty fluid cache of a easily stored concentration of Radon gas (though because of its short half-life it's still very much one of those use it or lose it substances, with possibly an extended life within a near solid 0 K storage), of which I believe this cache of Rn222 can be electrically induced or excited into exiting this ion thruster at a velocity as great as 0.1'c' (perhaps an exit velocity of 0.5'c' is technically doable if we're talking about a radon pumped laser cannon). Similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_eng...ColettiMPD.pdf Our lord all-knowing (aka World FactBook) Mook says; "Check it out" Here is how much thrust a rocket engine produces; F = mdot * Ve where mdot = mass flow rate, as kg/sec Ve = exhaust speed m/sec F = force (newtons) kg m/sec/sec Here is how much power a rocket engine's jet produces P = 1/2 * mdot * Ve^2 That is, the rate at which energy must be added to the exhaust jet is the kinetic energy of the parts. - - - - Of course this is not about any Mook passive alpha particle directing application, instead taking efficiency of the overall electrical and ion tossing system into account (such as thermal energy losses) adds to this existing amount of ion worth via applied electrical and magnetic energy that'll focus and accelerate those ions. So, it is not nearly as simple to express as one as Mook might suggest. However, at the notion of our getting rid of this initial tonne worth of our liquid cache of LRn222, at the ion mass flow rate of 1 kg/s, whereas the kinetic power or energy worth of thrust supposedly becomes: If the 1 kg/s flow of Rn ions and the exit Ve were made as great as 10%'c' = 3e7 m/s P = .5 * 9e14 = 4.5e14 kgf At utilizing this ion exit velocity of 0.1'c' (3e7 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using up one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of creating 4.5e14 kgf, of which this substance would push a 4.5e12 kg (4.5 gigatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to the gravity at the surface of Earth. At the more realistic ion exit velocity of 1% light speed is 0.01'c' (3e6 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of 4.5e12 kgf, of which would push a 4.5e10 kg (45 megatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to gravity at the surface of Earth. Of course the 45 megatonne spacecraft isn't hardly any more likely than human DNA or whatever spacecraft structurally surviving 100 gee. So, to start off with we'd likely have ourselves a whole lot smaller than 45 megatonne spacecraft, such as perhaps only as great as 4.5 megatonnes that'll exit away from Earth at perhaps as great as 10 gee, then once 10r (63,730 km and just 1% Earth gravity) is reached, whereas this is when the ion exit velocity could be safely punched up from 0.001'c' to 0.01'c', and eventually the maximum of 0.1'c' could be applied to as little as using a gram of Rn222 per second, because at 0.1'c' or better exit velocity is where you really do not require all that much mass flow per second. 0.1% light speed is 0.001'c' = 3e5 m/s 1 kg/sec at 3e5 m/s = .5 * 9e10 = 4.5e10 kgf 4.5e10 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 10 gee Using a gram/sec: 4.5e7 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 0.1 gee I believe that 1000 seconds of 10 gee acceleration is worth 78.4 km/s, though of course we'd be past the 10r of Earth within the first 600 seconds, and thereby able to ion whiz past that 78.4 km/s mark like it was standing still. This next part is often where my math takes yet another nose dive, but since I do not have the fly-by-rocket software and none others that claim as always being all-knowing are seldom willing to share, is why I'll just have to make do, especially since even the warm and fuzzy likes of Mook always takes the lowest road possible in order diminish and/or disqualify whatever isn't of his idea to start off with, excluding just enough of the good stuff in order to foil any further thought process. The required energy for a given thousand seconds worth of accelerating those Rn222 ions up to 3e5 m/s isn't exactly insignificant, demanding perhaps at least 245.2 GW.h (8.826 e14 J) for accommodating all 16.7 minutes worth of ion thrust. However, due to the overall efficiency of this energy transfer into accelerating those Rn ions is why it'll more than likely demand somewhat greater energy for accomplishing this task of tossing out the entire tonne worth those Rn222 alpha ions at the rate of one kg/s, even if that's initially accomplished at this minimal 0.001"c". However, since the existing Rn alpha particle velocity is already self motivated at 1.6e7 m/s(.054'c'), perhaps along with given another 5.6 MeV boost is where the required energy can be limited as to whatever's necessary for accomplishing a good exit focus or creating that laser cannon like beam, in which case the required ion thruster energy could become relatively minimal for accomplishing an impressive exit ion velocity of 3.26e7 m/s. At times this spacecraft is going to require a hole lot more electrical energy than any cache of Radium to Radon reactor could manage at 32 kw/Ra tonne, or even 320 kw/breeder Ra tonne. However, at a gross spacecraft mass of 4.5e6 tonnes, there's no problem with incorporating an h2o2/aluminum fuel cell of 100 GW.h capacity, or accommodating whatever Lithium nanotube ion battery storage, nuclear reactors or fusion alternatives. Once trekking off into interstellar space, and especially upon getting this craft past our nearest interstellar L1, and of the other gravity pulling us towards the likes of the relatively massive Sirius star/ solar system that we're already in blueshift as headed towards Sirius, as this is when as little as a mdot microgram/sec of Rn222 at the exit velocity of 0.2'c' would be more than sufficient ion thrust for continually accelerating this 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft towards the gravity pull of Sirius. For a one microgram/sec of Rn222 mdot at 0.2'c' example: P = .5e-9 * 3.6e15 = 1.5e6 kgf (1,500 tonnes/s of thrust, or in this case 0.000333 gee) The next problem gets down to the business of continually building up another cache of LRn from the Ra-Rn breeder reactor while on the fly, on behalf of that pesky matter of our having to ion retrothrust long before overshooting the intended target. At 4.5e9 kg, stopping this sucker that's by now going like a bat out of hell (possibly having reached 0.1'c') is going to take some doings. Of course, there would be generations of new and improved minds onboard in order to figure most of this out before arriving into the Sirius star/solar system, not to mention whatever could have been transmitted from Earth over the past century. BTW, at this point of topic argument sake, this mission to Sirius is a one way ticket to ride, with absolutely no travel package guaranties or ticket refunds allowed, because we may not be able to sufficiently retrothrust in order to save any of those brave souls, and a purely gravity-well trajectory turn-around or that of sufficiently aerobraking is at best iffy, although a substantial solar wind parachute as brake might eventually work. Also, recall the sheer size of these required ion thrust nacelles, as being somewhat Star Trek Enterprise like, and for all we know in need of those lithium crystals or perhaps lithium nanotubes as part of their function (after all, any good science fiction uses the regular laws of physics and the best available science, and for all we know lithium could still be part of it). . -BradGuth
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#10
February 14th 08, 07:54 PM
posted to sci.space.history,sci.space.policy,sci.space.shuttle,alt.astronomy,sci.physics.particle
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The Ion Interstellar Spaceship, from Hell to Sirius
Big time ion thrust is what'll get our future probes and eventually
ourselves to/from those distant places. Even Pb gas ions are usable, although requiring a good amount of energy for converting whatever Pb208(lead) into a gas of ions to start with may be more or less counter productive, especially when Rn222 ions can be derived from the decay of Ra226 as is without the need of introducing extra energy, and even the breeder cache of Ra226 that's pumped along by a Th232 fueled reactor may in fact become a darn good resource of energy, as well as offering a rather good breeder alternative at maximizing those various decay processes. At least Robert Clark isn't another one of those typical anti-think- tank naysayers in charge of banishing any such bulk use of ions for thrust, and of notions for storing enough of such ions (such as LRn222) for creating a fairly substantial amount or volume sustained thrust if given the necessary energy for accelerating such ions is part of the package deal. Of course, I've had to correct a few of those usual robo-moderated words as having been run together, so that a normal key word search would even turn up this "Stored ionized gas for ion drives" contribution of his, stating that such ion exhaust/ exit shouldn't have any difficulties in obtaining 10,000 km/s. Whereas I'm thinking the 16.7e3 km/s of the natural 5.6 MeV radium alpha/ion particle itself is perhaps not half of what a electrostatic boosted and magnetic focused Rn222 ion could actually muster, therefore its potential exit velocity of 34,000 km/s (that's better than 0.1'c') seems entirely doable, and of utilizing the much greater mass of those extremely active Rn222 ions should by rights benefit this thrust potential without ignoring any of those laws of physics. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.s...ba7 8d45e7e1b From: Robert Clark Date: Sep 28 2007, 4:53 pm Subject: Stored ionized gas for ion drives. To: sci.space.policy, sci.astro, sci.physics, sci.physics.relativity, sci.physics.fusion On Sep 20, 4:47 pm, Robert Clark wrote: This page gives a formula for the exhaust speed of an ion engine in terms of the charge on the ions and the voltage driving the ion flow: Ion thruster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Energy_usage The exhaust speed increases with the charge on the ions and decreases with their mass. You would think then that a light gas like hydrogen would be ideal since heavier gases even when fully ionized would still contain approximately equal numbers of neutrons as protons which would not contribute to the charge but would approximately double the mass. Yet it is the heavier gases like cesium and more recently xenon that are used. The explanation is that of the energy it takes to ionize the gas used as fuel. The figure on this page shows the energy to ionize a light gas such as hydrogen is relatively high compared to the heavier gases: Ionization Energies. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...al/ionize.html The figure gives the energy per mole which is high in itself. It is even worse when you consider this on a per mass basis since the mass amount of hydrogen would be so small compared to the amount of energy needed to ionize it. So could we instead store the hydrogen or some other light gas already in ionized form so we would not have to supply power to ionize the gas, only to accelerate it? If you used ionized hydrogen, so you would be accelerating protons, then using 6 x 10^18 protons to make one 1 Coulomb, and a mass of 1.6 x 10^-27 kg for a proton, and V representing the voltage in volts, the speed on the ions (protons) would be about (10^4)sqrt(2*V) in meters/ second. If we made the voltage be 5,000 V we would get 1,000,000 m/s speed much higher than any currention drive. Also, there are power supplies that convert low voltage high amperage power into high voltage, low amperage power, even up to 500,000 V. Then we could get 10,000,000 m/s = 10,000 km/s exhaust speed. The question is could we get light weight means of storing large amounts of ionized gas? Note that is this for space based propulsion not launch from Earth. You would have a possibly large energy generating station that remained in low Earth orbit to supply the power to ionize the gas once the spacecraft was placed in orbit. The power generator would be left behind in orbit. Then the volume of the gas container could be large to keep the density of the gas low. This would allow very thin container walls. Note the low density would also allow the electrostatic repulsion of the positively charged ions to be more easily constrained. A possible problem though is the charged ions contacting the walls could lead to a loss of ionization. You might be able to use a low level magnetic field to prevent the ions contacting the walls. Low density of the gas would insure the strength of the magnetic field required would be low. It might even be accomplished by thin permanent magnets so you would not need to use extra power. Some questions: what would be the electrostatic pressure produced by a low density highly ionized gas? What strength magnetic field would you need to contain it? Note that with an exhaust speed of say 10,000 km/s, by the rocket equation we could get the rocket itself up to relativistic speeds with acceptable mass ratios. Then this would provide a means of testing relativistic effects on macroscopic bodies. Bob Clark There is a lot of research on containing charged particles of only one charge, that is, all positive or all negative, because of fusion research. These are called "non-neutral" plasmas. There is a limit on the number of charged particles you can contain in a magnetic trap based on the strength of the magnetic field called the "Brillouin limit." However, some researchers have argued it is possible to exceed this limit: Confinement Of PureIonPlasma In A Cylindrical Current Sheet. http://www.pppl.gov/pub_report//2000/PPPL-3403.pdf Bob Clark Perhaps if those pesky MIB allow, others might care to ponder and subsequently offer their best swag(scientific wild ass guess) as to our getting the most out of accomplishing large scale ion thrust, not that Ra226-Rn222 need be the one and only ion alternative. However, with that nearby and gamma saturated moon of ours might actually suggest there's a good amount of lunar Thorium and Radium to behold (by night there should be LRn222 available), and you'd think Radium at becoming worth $1M/gram seems entirely worthy of our going after, perhaps even more so worthy than whatever 3He. (why the hell not accomplish extracting Th232, Ra226, LRn222 and 3He, as well as collecting Sodium and making local O2 in the process?) BTW, for some odd reason this topic has had contributions by 6 authors (including myself), but oddly none of those other than mine seems to have be retained by the all-knowing command of those in charge of this supposed public Usenet. . - Brad Guth On Feb 7, 10:40 am, BradGuth wrote: What if instead of our going with whatever's small, extremely cheap, fast and rad-hard robotic, what if going with larger is nearly always better? Perhaps this new and improved topic of "Building Spaceships" for accommodating us frail humans on interstellar treks, and of those multi generation habitat spacecraft being extensively ion thrusted, along with the wizardly help of William Mook and those few of us unafraid of whatever's out there, as such may be a little easier said than done, not to mention folks having to deal with my dyslexic encryption and frequent typos that can't always manage to keep those numbers or terminology half straight. Perhaps such a large scale ion thrusted spacecraft isn't quite as insurmountable as we've been told, and it's not that a pair or quad worth of substantial LRBs would not have to help get this rather substantial package off the pad (in modules if need be, and assembled at the moon's L1). However, upon launch and of once reaching the cool upper most atmosphere is where the potential of ion thrusting could start to contribute w/o Radon saturating Earth in the process, and obviously from whatever LEO point onward is where the real potential of ion thrust becomes impressive, especially since this method of electro-rocket thrust can be sustained for as long as the given cache of ions and electrical energy holds out. (with radium-radon there's a failsafe worth of 1600+ years before reaching half-life, so there's never a total lack of those Rn222 alpha/ions, and there's even some electron energy derived from the Radium-Rn breeder reactor) Given a sufficient cache of hefty ions and a sufficient onboard supply of electron energy for artificially accelerating and redirecting those ions into a narrow exit trajectory, and if this thrust is the direct result of a given ion flow rate or mass of whatever ion particles per second times the exit velocity squared, as then where's the insurmountable problem, other than your not standing anywhere behind those ion thrusters. Radon just so happens to make for a very good cache of substantially massive ions that are already quite active/reactive and supposedly going places as is, at roughly 1.63e7 m/sec. Liquid Radon or LRn222 represents a nifty fluid cache of a easily stored concentration of Radon gas (though because of its short half-life it's still very much one of those use it or lose it substances, with possibly an extended life within a near solid 0 K storage), of which I believe this cache of Rn222 can be electrically induced or excited into exiting this ion thruster at a velocity as great as 0.1'c' (perhaps an exit velocity of 0.5'c' is technically doable if we're talking about a radon pumped laser cannon). Similar to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_eng...ColettiMPD.pdf Our lord all-knowing (aka World FactBook) Mook says; "Check it out" Here is how much thrust a rocket engine produces; F = mdot * Ve where mdot = mass flow rate, as kg/sec Ve = exhaust speed m/sec F = force (newtons) kg m/sec/sec Here is how much power a rocket engine's jet produces P = 1/2 * mdot * Ve^2 That is, the rate at which energy must be added to the exhaust jet is the kinetic energy of the parts. - - - - Of course this is not about any Mook passive alpha particle directing application, instead taking efficiency of the overall electrical and ion tossing system into account (such as thermal energy losses) adds to this existing amount of ion worth via applied electrical and magnetic energy that'll focus and accelerate those ions. So, it is not nearly as simple to express as one as Mook might suggest. However, at the notion of our getting rid of this initial tonne worth of our liquid cache of LRn222, at the ion mass flow rate of 1 kg/s, whereas the kinetic power or energy worth of thrust supposedly becomes: If the 1 kg/s flow of Rn ions and the exit Ve were made as great as 10%'c' = 3e7 m/s P = .5 * 9e14 = 4.5e14 kgf At utilizing this ion exit velocity of 0.1'c' (3e7 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using up one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of creating 4.5e14 kgf, of which this substance would push a 4.5e12 kg (4.5 gigatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to the gravity at the surface of Earth. At the more realistic ion exit velocity of 1% light speed is 0.01'c' (3e6 m/s) A metric tonne of LRn that'll essentially become just plain old Rn gas of pure Rn222 ions, at using one kg/s = 1000 seconds worth of 4.5e12 kgf, of which would push a 4.5e10 kg (45 megatonne) spacecraft at 100 gee in relationship to gravity at the surface of Earth. Of course the 45 megatonne spacecraft isn't hardly any more likely than human DNA or whatever spacecraft structurally surviving 100 gee. So, to start off with we'd likely have ourselves a whole lot smaller than 45 megatonne spacecraft, such as perhaps only as great as 4.5 megatonnes that'll exit away from Earth at perhaps as great as 10 gee, then once 10r (63,730 km and just 1% Earth gravity) is reached, whereas this is when the ion exit velocity could be safely punched up from 0.001'c' to 0.01'c', and eventually the maximum of 0.1'c' could be applied to as little as using a gram of Rn222 per second, because at 0.1'c' or better exit velocity is where you really do not require all that much mass flow per second. 0.1% light speed is 0.001'c' = 3e5 m/s 1 kg/sec at 3e5 m/s = .5 * 9e10 = 4.5e10 kgf 4.5e10 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 10 gee Using a gram/sec: 4.5e7 kgf would push a 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft along at 0.1 gee I believe that 1000 seconds of 10 gee acceleration is worth 78.4 km/s, though of course we'd be past the 10r of Earth within the first 600 seconds, and thereby able to ion whiz past that 78.4 km/s mark like it was standing still. This next part is often where my math takes yet another nose dive, but since I do not have the fly-by-rocket software and none others that claim as always being all-knowing are seldom willing to share, is why I'll just have to make do, especially since even the warm and fuzzy likes of Mook always takes the lowest road possible in order diminish and/or disqualify whatever isn't of his idea to start off with, excluding just enough of the good stuff in order to foil any further thought process. The required energy for a given thousand seconds worth of accelerating those Rn222 ions up to 3e5 m/s isn't exactly insignificant, demanding perhaps at least 245.2 GW.h (8.826 e14 J) for accommodating all 16.7 minutes worth of ion thrust. However, due to the overall efficiency of this energy transfer into accelerating those Rn ions is why it'll more than likely demand somewhat greater energy for accomplishing this task of tossing out the entire tonne worth those Rn222 alpha ions at the rate of one kg/s, even if that's initially accomplished at this minimal 0.001"c". However, since the existing Rn alpha particle velocity is already self motivated at 1.6e7 m/s(.054'c'), perhaps along with given another 5.6 MeV boost is where the required energy can be limited as to whatever's necessary for accomplishing a good exit focus or creating that laser cannon like beam, in which case the required ion thruster energy could become relatively minimal for accomplishing an impressive exit ion velocity of 3.26e7 m/s. At times this spacecraft is going to require a hole lot more electrical energy than any cache of Radium to Radon reactor could manage at 32 kw/Ra tonne, or even 320 kw/breeder Ra tonne. However, at a gross spacecraft mass of 4.5e6 tonnes, there's no problem with incorporating an h2o2/aluminum fuel cell of 100 GW.h capacity, or accommodating whatever Lithium nanotube ion battery storage, nuclear reactors or fusion alternatives. Once trekking off into interstellar space, and especially upon getting this craft past our nearest interstellar L1, and of the other gravity pulling us towards the likes of the relatively massive Sirius star/ solar system that we're already in blueshift as headed towards Sirius, as this is when as little as a mdot microgram/sec of Rn222 at the exit velocity of 0.2'c' would be more than sufficient ion thrust for continually accelerating this 4.5e6 tonne spacecraft towards the gravity pull of Sirius. For a one microgram/sec of Rn222 mdot at 0.2'c' example: P = .5e-9 * 3.6e15 = 1.5e6 kgf (1,500 tonnes/s of thrust, or in this case 0.000333 gee) The next problem gets down to the business of continually building up another cache of LRn from the Ra-Rn breeder reactor while on the fly, on behalf of that pesky matter of our having to ion retrothrust long before overshooting the intended target. At 4.5e9 kg, stopping this sucker that's by now going like a bat out of hell (possibly having reached 0.1'c') is going to take some doings. Of course, there would be generations of new and improved minds onboard in order to figure most of this out before arriving into the Sirius star/solar system, not to mention whatever could have been transmitted from Earth over the past century. BTW, at this point of topic argument sake, this mission to Sirius is a one way ticket to ride, with absolutely no travel package guaranties or ticket refunds allowed, because we may not be able to sufficiently retrothrust in order to save any of those brave souls, and a purely gravity-well trajectory turn-around or that of sufficiently aerobraking is at best iffy, although a substantial solar wind parachute as brake might eventually work. Also, recall the sheer size of these required ion thrust nacelles, as being somewhat Star Trek Enterprise like, and for all we know in need of those lithium crystals or perhaps lithium nanotubes as part of their function (after all, any good science fiction uses the regular laws of physics and the best available science, and for all we know lithium could still be part of it). . -BradGuth
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