4 ms·
This article introduces more questions than it answers to me. How do you travel that fast & not disintegrate or crash into something? Was Mr Manchester's expe
by mattferderer 8y ago
This article introduces more questions than it answers to me.
How do you travel that fast & not disintegrate or crash into something?
Was Mr Manchester's experiment done using a laser to launch?
Has this been done before at any scale? Even pushing an item a few hundred feet up?
Is there a timeline for this to even get attempted?
I think it sounds really awesome but that makes me wonder if any of this is feasible soon. Sending tiny Raspberry Pi like devices into space at fast speeds that could do cheap experiments more quickly, that would be nice.
- neurobashing 8y agoNot to mention, where are all the other Bracewell probes from all the other interstellar civilizations? If there's life shouldn't the local area be teeming with them, since they're cheap and easy for any culture that can do spaceflight? (also, for fans of The Expanse, something something protomolecule)
- snowwrestler 8y agoHow the heck would we detect a 3 foot spacecraft that weighs a few grams, passing anywhere through the Solar System at speeds over 10% of light? We might be getting them once a week and we would have no idea. We can't even find or track most of our own asteroids, and they're already in solar orbit.
- sp332 8y agoThe KickSat was deployed as a 3U cubesat into orbit. The point was just to launch a ton of satellites at once, not to test some kind of propulsion tech. The relevant propulsion research was the Ikaros http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2010/07/20100709_ikaros_e.html http://global.jaxa.jp/press/2010/07/20100709_ikaros_e.html It accelerated at 1/10 G using only solar radiation.