4 ms·
Yeah, though there's lots of water in the outer solar system you can get your propellant from. The term to google is In Situ Resource Utalization (ISRU). http
by Symmetry 6y ago
Yeah, though there's lots of water in the outer solar system you can get your propellant from. The term to google is In Situ Resource Utalization (ISRU).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoBut those are mostly just orbiting the sun. If you ever wanted to send a probe to Proxima Centauri, and stop when it got there, accelerating the fuel you'd want to have available to decelerate up to solar escape velocity would be a tremendous energy expenditure, even if you can mine it in the asteroid belt. If, instead, you got lucky and jumped your probe (fuel tanks dry) on an interstellar wanderer that happened to be going approximately in the direction you wanted, you could have hundreds of tons of rocket fuel moving at interstellar velocities.
- detritus 6y agoTrue, but those interstellar velocities are mercilessly pitiful in respect to much of use there.