Sailing through space on a plasma beam

Sailing through space on a plasma beam

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SEATTLE – Sitting in the cramped coach section of a transcontinental airliner for five or six hours can be trying enough. But consider NASA's "reference mission" to Mars. Astronauts will be cooped up in their craft for up to six months each way as they travel to and from the Red Planet.

Robert Winglee and his colleagues would like to give these future explorers a break. Inspired by the sun's influence on Earth, the team is developing a unique approach to space propulsion. The craft it envisions hurtles through space on sails made of magnetic fields. The sails billow under pressure from the solar "wind" - electrically charged particles from the sun - or from intense man-made plasma beams, which special satellites would aim at the sails.

These approaches could slash the travel time to Mars from roughly six months each way to 40 days, reckons the group, led by Dr. Winglee, director of the University of Washington's Research Institute for Space Exploration. An unmanned mission to the edge of the solar system itself could be slashed from roughly 40 years to a decade or so....cont'd

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1202/p15s01-stss.html

Not real hot about the idea of small nuclear devices hovering overhead. The Sun option sounds like the smarter, safer way to go if there's a way to do it practically.

Thanks for the link!

Slower, but the "fuel" is free. Shipping supplies to a Mars colony would be a great application for solar sails.

Another variation on this ion-beam idea would be to use a laser. Build a ship with solar sails, but boost it with a laser, kept focused on the sail. (props to Robert Forward)

Wow. 40 days. That's actually doable. I mean, that's slow-boat to China kinda timing. Let's hope we actually get there in our lifetimes.

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/propulsion.html

The ultra-cool thing about the M2P2 (Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion) idea is that it's size is determined by a pressure balance between the plasma and the solar wind, so as you get further from the sun and the solar wind gets weaker, the plasma sail gets larger so that the net force on the spacecraft stays roughly the same for a long time before other effects come into play...