Space Odyssey 2: Plasma-based Space Travel a Reality -A Galaxy Insight
Someday, the earth will be a place humanity will come back to, sort of like our national park. I don't mean to get rid of the earth like an old shoe. We need to protect it so that we can always come back to it.
Franklin Chang Diaz, former astronaut, president and CEO of Ad Astra Rocket Company,
discusses his work on a plasma-based propulsion system that could improve fuel efficiency and get a manned mission to in 39 days in a brilliant wide-ranging interview with MIT's Technology Review below.
Like a scene on the spaceship Discovery in 2001 A Space Odyssey, this coming January Ad Astra will test the VX-200, a full-scale ground prototype of the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMIR). First conceived in 1979, the rocket is an attempt to improve on current space-propulsion technologies using hot plasma, heated by radio waves and controlled by a magnetic field.
If all this goes according to plan, Chang Diaz hopes to eventually build VASIMIRs that could travel to and beyond.
For the U.S.to conduct a serious space-exploration program, Chang Diaz belives "we need to develop two things: power and propulsion. Power in space is still severely limited. Mainly, we use solar power. This is fine as long as we stay near the sun, but the issue remains that for and beyond, we will need to develop nuclear electric power. If we don't, we might as well quit. We're not going to get anywhere without it."
Propulsion, Diaz calims is the missing
link. We have been going into space in venerable rockets--the
technology has changed little, and will not be sufficient for us to go
to and to go beyond Mars.
Accoding to Chang, "trips to Mars
are prohibitively long and would expose the travelers to very high
levels of radiation. I came to realize after my [NASA] flights that
space is a tough place to be. If you're going to spend months and
months drifting from one planet to another, then, like [former
astronaut] John Young says, you're going to spend half the time looking
out the window to the place that you came from, and the other half
looking out the window to the place that you're going. They're both
going to be little points of light, and you're going to discover what
loneliness is all about. I think that pretty much sums it up: space is
a vast void, and you're really going to have to travel fast if you're
going to have any chance of surviving. I also would not want to send
people to on a fragile and power-limited ship. If you send people
that far, you have to give them a fighting chance to survive, and the
only way you can do that is if you have ample supplies of power. Power
is life in space.
About the near furture of space exploration,
he believes that "lots of people are going to be moving into space. I
think we will be populating the moon, building enclaves of research and
even money-making ventures there. Just last month, Ad Astra signed an
agreement with Excalibur Exploration Ltd., a British company, to mine
asteroids [when the time is right]. I believe there will be a huge
demand for resources, particularly water, from asteroids and comets,
because taking water from the earth is going to be very expensive.
We're probably going to supply the moon and the habitat on the moon
with water from comets."
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Posted by: Barry O'Leary | September 27, 2007 at 06:04 PM