Engines to travel to the stars

To travel through space we need powerful engines, but ones that consume little. Currently, we have, on the one hand, traditional chemical engines that are used in rockets, which can be solid fuel engines or liquid fuel engines, liquid fuels that The most common are oxygen, hydrogen, and kerosene, but methane is also being experimented with.

There are various combinations that are mixed fuels, the important thing is that these engines provide a lot of thrust, but they need to consume a lot of fuel, the thrust thing is very good because it allows you to overcome the force of Earth's gravity, the bad thing about consuming a lot of fuel is that you need spend many tons to be able to send a small piece of merchandise or a small ship to space.

Trying to navigate through space with these chemical engines would require an enormous amount of fuel and that would mean huge, gigantic ships that would also be much more expensive. On the one hand, chemical fuels are good for leaving a planet but are not as good. to travel through space, but on the other hand we have electric motors of various types, there are combinations and various energy sources for these electric motors, they provide little thrust but consume very little fuel.

Although this thrust is cumulative, so that great speeds can be reached over time, they are not useful for leaving the Earth, the Moon or Mars, but they are useful for navigating through space and reaching very far. The latter is very good if It is a robotic probe, a New Horizons, for example, but if you are a human you would not find it pleasant to have to wait months to achieve an acceptable speed, which is why researchers are looking for an alternative that is powerful and that does not require much. fuel.

There are several projects underway, this week it is news that NASA has given the go-ahead to Howe Industries, the concept of this company is a plasma rocket that aims to send astronauts to Mars in at most two months; There are others that the Pentagon is developing, although NASA would also benefit from this engine, another British one and a third Chinese one; It is very difficult to obtain some images, you already know why.

The images are with animations about what these engines would be like and although they are represented installed on a spaceship, remember that they are engines and therefore they can be adapted to a large ship design, there could be, for example, a version of the StarShip with an engine of this type. type or a wheel-shaped ship to create, for example, artificial gravity but that was driven by one of these engines.

The pulsar is the project of a British company Pulsar Fusion, which is associated with the American Princeton Satellite System to create a rocket engine that works with a nuclear fusion reactor, nuclear fusion is uniting hydrogen atoms preferably, hydrogen isotopes to achieve this. They will also apply Artificial Intelligence, in this way they will be able to advance faster in development and also better understand very complex issues such as the behavior of plasma at high temperatures in electromagnetic confinement.

Nuclear fusion seeks to produce energy like stars do, fusing hydrogen atoms. Currently, reactors can fuse atoms but it is not easy, since they are not able to produce enough energy and do so continuously to be profitable, although it is something that is expected to be achieved within a few years, when they achieve it it will completely change our way of obtaining energy, since it will mean an advance as a civilization we will be able to obtain energy in the same way that the stars obtain it.

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)

! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!