To Mars and Back in Ninety Days

paltemalte writes "A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at the University of Washington could dramatically cut the time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and could make humans a permanent fixture in space. In fact, with magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, or mag-beam, quick trips to distant parts of the solar system could become routine, said Robert Winglee, a UW Earth and space sciences professor who is leading the project."

This is fine and well, but...

This is fine and well, but how does one meanwhile solves the most pressing problem, that is, providing CHEAP and RELIABLE means to get into earth orbit???

Re:This is fine and well, but...

Point taken. However, dropping the amount of fuel you have to hoist into orbit can only help.

Re:This is fine and well, but...

Scaled still hasn't equalled the Mercury, much less the Vostok program yet. They're about at where NASA/USAF was with the X-15.

Spaceship One has no chance of surviving re-entry at orbital velocities. Tier Two is going to need to be a totally new craft. I'm also betting its body shape will be closer to Buran or the STS than Spaceship One's. You need some bulk to carry the required heat shielding. You can't "feather" your way out of orbit, since there's no atmosphere for the feathers to work on.

That isn't to say that I don't think that Scaled can do it, eventually. I'm just not willing to pee my pants in joy over their relatively minor accomplishments so far.

Re:This is fine and well, but...

you just don't get it. NASA doesn't even fart for 20mio$ much less get up 100kms. Small, baby steps procedure coupled with the profit and loss test of private enterprise will get us into orbit, cheaply, one day, if there is sufficient demand for it. Steady wins the race.

Sign me up...

Sign me up, should this ever become a reality. However, the only way space travel will become an everyday occrance is if it is profitable. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to do it for the sake of doing it. But people aren't willing to spend millions/billions/trillions of dollars to do something just because "its there".

Re:Sign me up...

But people aren't willing to spend millions/billions/trillions of dollars to do something just because "its there".

I would say that the tourism industry disproves that assumption quite nicely.

Re:Sign me up...

for 1 moment there an image of a callcenter full of indians located on the barren sands of mars crossed my mind...

Re:Sign me up...

I think I've said this before, but the nearest asteroid to earth is worth something over 3 trillion in materials.

Re:Sign me up...

Actually it isn't... once we have the tech to get to the asteroids and farm them, the materials suddenly go from 'rare' to 'abundant', and the price drops faster than the space shuttle on reentry...

This is precisely why DeBeers are so keen to differentiate between 'real' (ie. they dug them out of the ground and make a fortune out of) and 'fake' (manufactured, potentially dirt cheap) diamonds - even though you need an electron microscope to actually tell the difference.

New Method?

What's all this about a "new method" being required for short trips to Mars? What about the 101 old methods [wikipedia.org] we have? Nuclear Thermal, Nuclear Electric, Orion, Laser Lifters, Nuclear Salt Water (this seriously needs to be developed!), Fission Fragment engines, Nuclear Steam ships, etc, etc, etc.

We've got high powered propulsion options pouring out of our ears. It all comes down to getting funding. Wave a plan near congress and they're sure to kill it before breakfast.

Re:New Method?

You forgot the best:
Press 'H' to jump into hyperspace.

Re:Waving

you're suggesting congress is being ran by Vulcans? Which is nowhere near as funny as actually being moderated interesting for it ;-)

Phooey

I poo-poo your silly idea Philleas Fog.. It's impossible and I'll wager my reputation that you won't make it from the Gentleman's Club in London to Mars and back within 90 days!

There is, of course, a major problem here...

The article mentions having one station here and another on the other side, so that the craft itself need not carry its own propulsion.

However, any sort of malfunction - from the braking side not firing at the right time, to the braking side getting knocked off angle by a micrometeorite at the wrong moment, to the craft itself getting pushed off course - would mean that the craft itself would go hurtling through space with no real chance to be rescued.

The way around this? Keep an on-board propulsion system that's able to slow it down from full-speed back to 0, and then speed it up enough to get back to where you were going originally in a reasonable amount of time.

Which kind of defeats the purpose of the entire method.

Re:There is, of course, a major problem here...

This isn't really a problem.

It sounds terrible, but really: any sort of malfunction in a self-contained craft, and the crew is completely SOL. This isn't like driving a car, where if you're off by a little bit, you just correct and pull into the correct stall anyway.

All the equipment either works as planned and the ship stays on course, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you're screwed. Period.

But this is nothing new. Exploring new frontiers has always been dangerous, and that hasn't stopped people from doing it. Sailing across the Atlantic wasn't exactly safe; if something went wrong (including something like the wind not blowing), you were done. Travelling from the US east coast to the west coast wasn't exactly a joyride, either, as anyone who's played Oregon Trail can tell you.

The point is, if we get ourselves hung up on making it perfectly safe, we'll never actually do it. Safety stagnates progress, because risk/reward is immutable. It's the unknown. That's both its value and its danger. What we need is a best-effort at safety, and willing volunteers.

Something tells me that there'd be no shortage of the latter. Say someone walked up to you and said "you can be one of the first people on Mars...but there's a 10% chance you won't make it. Want to go?"

It's possible you'd say no, I suppose. But there are plenty of people who'd leap at the chance, myself included.

Why dont we

Just send a diplomat to Mars, establish a trade agreement and an alliance with them and build a road.

Then we can quickly invade when they least expect it. When you play enough Rome Total War these things become soooo obvious.

Second Law

Can anyone tell me how the "pusher" satellite in the picture is supposed to work? I see one beam of energy with enough force to accelerate a spacecraft with a lot of force. Either there's an invisible other beam balancing this out, scorching the Earth underneath, or the satellite is doing a much better job of propelling itself out of the solar system than it is pushing the distant spacecraft where it's supposed to go. Or has someone figured out how to suspend Newton's second law?

Shipping the fuel to Mars = $T

The big "breakthtrough" here is to decouple the propulsion system (the plasma beam) from the spacecraft. That makes the craft smaller and lighter since it doesn't have to move all that fuel around.

HOWEVER...

This system requires having another plasm beam generator to "catch" the spacecraft and slow it down with another plasma beam. That means not only sending the generator platform to Mars, but also all of the material from which to make the plasma (most likely nitrogen or one of the heavier noble gases). The generator platform needs a power source capable of sustaing the creating and acceleration of the plasma beam, which means nuclear, and a fission nuclear reaction, not radiothermic generation. All of that means a technically complex space station, with people to keep it running. To have such a system in Earth orbit would be tough enough. The cost and difficulty of shipping all of that material out to a Mars orbit, and maintaining it so it will be ready to deccelerate an incoming spacecraft would be Absolutely Enormous.

Re:High Speed?

after actually /reading/ the article, they have a plan in place to "slow down" the approaching spacecraft...namely another plasma shooter at the other end. I don't know how I feel about that. Maybe if there was a conventional backup solution like thrusters or something...I dunno. Thrusters might slow you down enough to navigate into orbit, but a highspeed orbit would probably be dangerously close to the atmosphere...

W.W.K.D

What Would Kirk Do?

Re:High Speed?

You can always spin the spacecraft around. That's exactly what they do/did with the Space shuttle. You may be traveling at an obscenely high rate of speed, but you have 360/360 degrees of freedom for attitude. Haven't you ever played Asteroids?

Re:High Speed?

What about wrapping around the screen though?

I'll tell you what Kirk would do

What Would Kirk Do?

I'll tell you what Kirk would do... he'd let Spock & Scotty worry about getting the plasma whoosiwhatsis working while he took off to go seduce the high priestess, that's what Kirk would do.

Re:thoughts

OK, this was slashdotted but I eventually got through and it answered some other questions... Here's the text for the less lucky people...

Oct. 14, 2004 |

Science and Tech [slashdot.org]
New propulsion concept could make 90-day Mars round trip possible
FROM: Vince Stricherz [mailto] [e-mail] [mailto]206-543-2580 [slashdot.org]
John Carscadden, University of Washington In this artist's conception, a plasma station (lower left) applies a magnetized beam of ionized plasma to a spacecraft bound for Jupiter.

A new means of propelling spacecraft being developed at the University of Washington could dramatically cut the time needed for astronauts to travel to and from Mars and could make humans a permanent fixture in space.

In fact, with magnetized-beam plasma propulsion, or mag-beam, quick trips to distant parts of the solar system could become routine, said Robert Winglee, a UW Earth and space sciences professor who is leading the project.

Currently, using conventional technology and adjusting for the orbits of both the Earth and Mars around the sun, it would take astronauts about 2.5 years to travel to Mars, conduct their scientific mission and return.

"We're trying to get to Mars and back in 90 days," Winglee said. "Our philosophy is that, if it's going to take two-and-a-half years, the chances of a successful mission are pretty low."

Mag-beam is one of 12 proposals that this month began receiving support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Institute for Advanced Concepts. Each gets $75,000 for a six-month study to validate the concept and identify challenges in developing it. Projects that make it through that phase are eligible for as much as $400,000 more over two years.

Under the mag-beam concept, a space-based station would generate a stream of magnetized ions that would interact with a magnetic sail on a spacecraft and propel it through the solar system at high speeds that increase with the size of the plasma beam. Winglee estimates that a control nozzle 32 meters wide would generate a plasma beam capable of propelling a spacecraft at 11.7 kilometers per second. That translates to more than 26,000 miles an hour or more than 625,000 miles a day.

Mars is an average of 48 million miles from Earth, though the distance can vary greatly depending on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun. At that distance, a spacecraft traveling 625,000 miles a day would take more than 76 days to get to the red planet. But Winglee is working on ways to devise even greater speeds so the round trip could be accomplished in three months.

But to make such high speeds practical, another plasma unit must be stationed on a platform at the other end of the trip to apply brakes to the spacecraft.

"Rather than a spacecraft having to carry these big powerful propulsion units, you can have much smaller payloads," he said.

Winglee envisions units being placed around the solar system by missions already planned by NASA. One could be used as an integral part of a research mission to Jupiter, for instance, and then left in orbit there when the mission is completed. Units placed farther out in the solar system would use nuclear power to create the ionized plasma; those closer to the sun would be able to use electricity generated by solar panels.

The mag-beam concept grew out of an earlier effort Winglee led to develop a system called mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion. In that system, a plasma bubble would be created around a spacecraft and sail on the solar wind. The mag-beam concept removes reliance on the solar wind, replacing it with a plasma beam that can be controlled for strength and direction.

A mag-beam test mission could be possible

Re:Why send people to Mars?

Billions of tax dollars shouldn't be blown on a project of little scientific validity just because "it's cool."

I'm sorry sir, but you must now relinquish your Slashdot UID and turn in your geek card. Someone will escort you to the exit.

Re:increased speed equals drastically increased ri

Not really. Micrometorites would be on the surface of the Earth. Now as for Micrometoriods... they are mainly a hazard to orbiting spacecraft, and mainly because mankind has been dumping stuff into orbit for 50 years. Sure, there are elevated risks of micrometeriod collisions around comets and such, but the little buggers are already moving at such a fantastic speed that the added velocity of the spacecraft is negligable.

And no, spacecraft right now are NOT beer cans. They contain an outer shell, and several layers of different material to prevent micrometeriods from penetrating the pressure hull. Windows are specially designed, and if you pay attention to photographs from spacecraft you would see tons of scratches on the outer surface.

Guess what they are from?