Happy May the 4rth (erm, 5th)!
Many star wars fans greeted one another in excitable fashion yesterday, saying things like May the 4rth be with you, and other nonsense. Coffee stands dressed up and served Chewbacca's Han Solo's, and General Grieves's cure for the common cold (also known as chai tea), and the dog park was filled with dueling dogs with lightsabers. I took no part myself, and merely watched while eating an R2D2 burrito.
I brought along a very special friend to talk about space travel, and how close we are to building a Millennium Falcon. Her name is Braille the cat, and she has a B.A. in applied physics, and a PHD in haberdashery. She is also blind in one eye, but it doesn't seem to hamper her greatly. I present: Braille.
*Ahem* Thanks, as mentioned, I am a cat with many talents. I have lived a varied life, and spent most of my study learning about various methods of propulsion. To build a Millennium Falcon, we will obviously need some form of warp drive mechanism. In this day and age, we have 3 possibilities, as no one has truly created a warp drive or discovered dilithium.
Our first option is regular propulsion. Rockets and standard engines burn fuel at enormous rates to propel them forward. On earth this isn't an issue, cars get 30mpg, and can go quite a ways on a tank of gas, very quickly. An average car traveling 60 miles per hour on the freeway is traveling almost 30 meters per second (in space I will be referring to objects traveling in m/s). If the car gets low on fuel, it can stop at a gas station.
In space, as you may have guessed, there are no gas stations. Any fuel we need must be brought up with us. This is the primary problem with rocket propulsion. However, it is fast. The more we burn fuel, the faster the rocket goes. And in space, things don't really slow down. There is no air resistance, so an object moving tends to stay moving. Overall, rocket fuel is excellent for short missions, but fairly useless if you want to travel to mars, then to Jupiter and back again.
Our second option is Ion propulsion.
It sounds very futuristic, but the truth is, Ion propulsion is already being used by our latest generation satellites and probes. Simply put, Ion propulsion take a charged element, like xenon, and strips the ions away and burns them to create thrust. Ion thrusters use very little energy, and take a long time to get up to speed. Imagine your car taking 48 hours to get from 0-60mph. However, they can travel for years before they need to refuel or be repaired. These are a great option, but lack the true speed for warp drive. Xenon, a common propulsion element for Ion thrusters, is also expensive, and hard to obtain.
Our third option is EM, or ElectroMagnetic propulsion.
This option may have potential, but no one has created a solid working prototype yet. It is largely theoretical. The basic idea is to blast a cone shaped container with magnetic waves, like a microwave. If you blast it with enough waves, they begin bouncing around, eventually hitting the small end of the cone, kind of like pouring juice down a funnel. This would create the thrust needed in space. Why is this idea so radical? Because unlike Ion or rockets, it requires only electrical current, and does not require fuel. Given a couple of EM thrusters, and a lot of solar panels, a probe could get up to speed as fast as a rocket, and never run out of energy. However, as I mentioned above, it is still in the theoretical stage.
Our best bet? Steal from the aliens who live on mars. I'm sure they have warp drives and space craft. Mwahahaha!
*Sheepdog backs away from Braille slightly* "...Okay, thanks for that Braille." Now, ahem, I think I'll take a stroll.
Woof!
<Meow!>
"Braille here, and I get the last word, Ha!"
