starship-design: Re: Perihelion Maneuver

[kuo@bit.csc.lsu.edu (Isaac Kuo)]

L. Parker wrote:

>I would venture that ANY concept we currently have going is more than a few 
>orders of magnitude from being interstellar capable. As you said in an 
>earlier post (regarding solar sails in particular), they are capable on 
>intersystem use only.

My personal favorite is a modified MagOrion, where a track of nuclear
bombs are used to accelerate a large superconducting magsail.  The
bombs are detonated far from the magsail so that the exposure to
hard radiation is minimized and the push from the fraction of ions
which "hit" the sail is spread out.

Unfortunately, I do not have even vague numbers on bomb mass, yields,
and products.  These are absolutely critical to determining how
feasable this concept is.  Does anyone else here have numbers for this?

My intuition is that if we could get around treaty limitations, it
would be possible to send an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri
within our lifetimes (but it wouldn't arrive until later).
-- 
    _____     Isaac Kuo kuo@bit.csc.lsu.edu http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~kuo
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