Here's another one I got via Instapundit and Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence blogs. I read the abstract and thought it interesting, so I downloaded the pdf file and spent the last few hours perusing this thing.
Not that I know anything about the subject matter, just as a matter of curiosity. A few items of interest, to wit:
1) it is not necessarily feasible for putting humans in orbit because of high g forces 2) it may have the potential to transport very large objects into space at low cost per kilogram 3) the technology required is not unreasonably demanding. Now I am taking the guy (Parkin) at his word that thing will do what he says it can do. If he is right, then this concept has a chance.
How does it work? It uses microwave energy to heat hydrogen and uses that as thrust to lift the rocket into space. For a more detailed explanation, see the abstract and pdf file if you are interested.
Update: It uses hydrogen as a propellant, but this would seem to be a problem when the hot
hydrogen meets the oxygen in the atmosphere. Maybe it would go boom instead of going up.
This idea was a doctoral thesis, so I don't how that turned out.
Update 2: I skimmed over the document again and found no discussion of this hydrogen issue. Perhaps it isn't an issue and I am mistaken. Or it could be an oversight by Parkin. At any rate, I'll still say this looks like an interesting proposition.
1 comment:
Another update, this time by comment: It appears that the part of the proposed system that uses hydrogen has already been tested in the cancelled NERVA program that was interplanetary capable. This was an existing program that was approved and man rated according to this source (by man rated I take it to mean that humans could be transported):
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/NERVA.html
The NERVA program was cancelled by the Nixon administration. Evidently there were environmental concerns since it was a nuclear powered rocket.
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