Why does NASA always spread false hope like this?
We know its never going to happen and will go to Mars anyway with shitty degenerate chemical rockets.
it's true though
what is a laser powered speceship ?
>>7886740
Like a solar sail, but propelled by a laser fired from the moon or orbit.
>>7886750
what kind of tests or information do they have to conclude that it can travel 300 000 m / s
>>7886734
It is just the press hyping things up to get readership/views. Happens all the time. They take a thing out of context, misunderstand it, blow it way out of proportion, and present it to the public. It is a common and widespread issue.
If the speed of light is the absolute speed limit, and 99.99999% of the universe is more than a thousand lightyears away, why do we bother with space exploration research?
>>7886761
>what kind of tests or information do they have to conclude that it can travel 300 000 m / s
pic related
>>7886981
There's literally around a million stars in that 0.00001%.
>>7886987
>putting it in with the hooky end first
Idiot
>>7886991
He wanted to fish out that last nugget. You know the kind that always remains no matter how hard you try to get it out.
>>7886994
I do not have this pooping issue
>>7886998
Lucky you, Pajeet.
>>7886853
>>7886981
>why do we bother
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?
>>7886981
You might as well rule out all the local stars too with how impossibly hard interstellar travel actually is.
>>7886734
Because they need more money.
>powered by light projected from earth
>can only travel in a single trajectory
>no course correction
>no brakes
>never stopping
>>7886994
you need a better diet
>>7887318
>implying a return trajectory is even possible at that speed
Travelling there in 6 months gives you a free return to earth in case of an abort. Goimg any faster would be foolish. Extra propulsive power should go towards extra cargo.
>>7887370
True. This technology would best be suited to unmanned supply drops. If perfected it could give astronauts on Mars fresh supplies on demand with only one week of lead time.
Think about that for a second.
>>7886750
>or orbit.
lol Using what to keep it in orbit?
>>7888483
the earth duh
>>7886734
>Mars is 249 million miles away
>trip is only 72 hours
>steady speed needed is 3.45 million miles an hour (that's 0mph to 3.45mil mph instantly)
That means it needs to travel faster than 3.45mill mph for part of the journey then spend a longer time breaking so it comes down to orbital speeds.
The g-forces alone would kill anything and destroy anything you tried to use to just make the ship with. Even if it went from 0 to 3.45mill mph over the course of the entire 72 hours (which means it wouldn't get there in 72 hours) it'd be accelerating at around 47,916.6mph. Which would be doable since that's like 0.6g, but you'd only get a fraction of the distance there in 72 hours.
>>7888504
"or orbit" implies, neigh, actually means the object housing the laser is not on the planet.
>>7886734
>>We know its never going to happen
So this was work done by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts(NIAC), they do work on crazy ideas that might just work. It is important to do this sort of work because some day these crazy ideas might actually work.
It might not be practical now to send a (100 kg robotic) spacecraft to Mars in 72 hours, but someday in the future when we have people on Mars and space infrastructure it might.
Now if you read the paper they make a pretty good case for photonic propulsion:
http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/A-Roadmap-to-Interstellar-Flight-15-d.pdf
Not to mention they offer a pretty good method for accelerating objects to relativistic velocities using near future technologies. Which lets you do things like bomb mars with relativistic kill vehicles. BECAUSE FUCK YOU MARS!
OH and the same laser system can be used to redirect asteroids away from earth:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/10/destar-phased-array-laser-systems-for.html
>>7888483
photons have no mass silly
>>7886734
they need more money
>>7889272
>future tense
This is very much a here and now technology. We could easily overtake Voyager with this, and without the need for an onboard propulsion system, our long range probes can be fitted with much larger payloads than ever before. There's a lot of confusion because this is overkill for the scales we are used to. I wouldn't use this to get to Mars. I would use it to get to Alpha Centauri.
And there's no doubt NASA can build a 1 meter prototype and send it off, with just materials they have lying around on the floor. The technology is perfectly scalable.
>>7887311
Wouldn't it be better to use a laser-powered thermal rocket? This way it still needs reaction mass (but has more thrust, and it's controllable) but at least the power plant can stay in Earth's orbit.
>>7889390
>So Lubin has proposed a laser system called photonic propulsion, in which spacecraft equipped with giant laser sails could be pushed along to increasing speeds with a powerful laser.
Newton's Third Law
>>7891741
I am not sure aiming a laser in a 1m2 target over several AUs is that easy.
>>7886981
You probably aren't white, you can't understand, we are adventurers, we MUST go beyond what we know, it's in us.
We'll make whatever is possible to achieve this, may it be generational ship, immortality, frozen hibernation, near light speed travel, or something else, only one sure is certain, we will go there.
>>7891806
You don't. Conservation of momentum, dude.
>http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04254.pdf
>pp13
>Figure d, Kinetic energy distribution spectrum of electrons emitted from graphene sponge under laser (450 nm) illumination showed a broad energy distribution
>4.25E4 mW cm-2
42,500mW = 42.5W, cm-2 = 0.01cm, so 42.5W/0.01cm. 1cm / 0.01cm = 100(1)cm, 42.5 * 100 = 4,250W of thrust per square centimeter.
1W = 1N, so one single cubic centmeter of graphene can produce 4,250N of thrust. 1N lifts 1kg, so this is pretty much jawdropping.
I think the EMdrive is a smokescreen to hide this incredible technology, qnd I wonder why none of these headlines ever mention graphene. It's like they want to give people ignorant or something - another smokescreen is 'white graphene,' which is really boron.
>>7886750
Forget that - stick a nuclear reactor on the ship, and produce your own laser. Fusion would be ideal, even if it doesn't break even - the important part is that it provides constant, enormous power and eats hydrogen.
