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Re: starship-design: Fuel costs
Kelly wrote:
>Electricity costs about 4-10 cents per kilowatt hour. If you could convert
>the energy directly into antimatter. Antimater would (at $0.05 a KwHour)
>cost $1.25 E9 per kilogram. Thats one and a quarter billion dollars a
>kilo! Given that an Explorer class ship has a mass of 500,000 tons. That
>comes to a fuel mass of 210,000 tons. Half of which is anti-matter. Thats
>105,000,000 kg of anti-matter for a cost of roughly $130 E15 or about 130
>thousand trillion dollars, or a bit under 100,000 times the federal budget.
>8(
>
>
>For comparison a Li-6 fueled fusion craft would take 4,570 times its dry
>weight in fuel to get to half light speed. For an Explorer class thats
>2.23 E9 tons of lithium-6. (Which is about 8% of the mass of a given mass
>of mined Lithium. Maybe we can seel back the other isotopes of lithium
>after we remove the isotope we want?) At current comercial rates ( priced
>at about $300/lb. Or $660/Kg) for Lithium (ignoring procesing fees) that
>tonage would cost about $1,470 Trillion dollars, or 1 thousand times the
>federal budget. Nearly a hundred fold improvement. 8(
This is still "raw" energy, the processing costs needed for normal
electrical energy are now inside the design of the starship. I think your
comparison should include the power plants (and the maintaining of them)
inside the starship.
Timothy