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Spacecraft Traveling Close to Light Speed Should Be Visible with Current Tech

• api 12y ago
  Side point, but I have heard shielding proposals for dealing with the matter collision problem. Basically you could create a plasma cloud ahead of yourself and hold it there magnetically. It would take a ton of energy to generate and maintain, but if you're doing this at all then you're already pretty good at generating a whole lot of energy. Anything impacting your plasma shield would itself become plasma. Plasma can be controlled by a magnetic field, so as soon as this happens your magnetic field grabs it and it becomes part of your shield mass. Many potential relativistic propulsion systems such as fusion or antimatter rockets have exhaust that is partly plasma, so maybe a simple way to engineer such a shield would be to just waste a little bit of your propulsion output by facing it forward combined with a massive electromagnetic field generator. Seems like generating the energy required to accelerate to these velocities is like 90% of the problem. But it's possible. There are already paper designs like Project Orion (thermonuclear pulse rocket) that could achieve as much as 10-20% the speed of light, which is sufficient for close interstellar flights in a human lifetime.