Future



This is my page on the future of spacecraft engines.

So what should a future spacecraft engine be able to do? Certainly, one major goal would be for it to allow spacecraft to travel through the solar system more quickly than they can now. While a lot of things have changed in over 40 years, today's spacecraft are still traveling at about the same speed that John Glenn did when he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.

What we have to day.

media type="custom" key="4527216" The chemical engine works like this. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen are pumped into the main engine and heated to 760ºC by pre-burners. The hot gases are then mixed and burned in a combustion chamber at 3300ºC. Some cold fuel is pumped into tubes around the nozzle to cool it. Each engine is designed for 7.5 hours use before needing to be serviced. At 8 minutes use per flight, it could last for 55 flights.

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Ion thrusters utilize beams of ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) to create thrust in accordance with Newton's third law. Thmedia type="youtube" key="7ozKUXiAs1Q" height="344" width="425" align="left"e method of accelerating the ions varies, but all designs take advantage of the charge/ mass  ratio of the ions. This ratio means that relatively small potential differences can create very high exhaust velocities. This reduces the amount of reaction mass or fuel required, but increases the amount of specific power required compared to chemical rockets. Ion thrusters are therefore able to achieve extremely high specific impulses. The drawback of the low thrust is low spacecraft acceleration because the mass of current electric power units is directly correlated with the amount of power given. This low thrust makes ion thrusters unsuited for launching spacecraft into orbit, but they are ideal for in-space propulsion applications. Various ion thrusters have been designed and they all generally fit under two categories. The thrusters are categorized as either electrostatic or electromagnetic. The main difference is how the ions are accelerated.
 * Electrostatic ion thrusters use the Coulomb force and are categorized as accelerating the ions in the direction of the electric field.
 * Electromagnetic ion thrusters use the Lorentz force to accelerate the ions.

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media type="custom" key="4527242" VASIMR stands for Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket. Not only would VASIMR allow for faster space travel, it would have some pretty incredible side benefits, as well. For example, NASA researchers believe that VASIMR would be able to travel to Mars much more quickly than a contemporary chemical-powered rocket, and then, once there, to refuel on Mars for the return flight to Earth. The VASIMR engine could also even help protect astronauts from the dangerous effects of radiation during their trip. In the less-distant future, VASIMR could even help keep the International Space Station (ISS) in orbit without requiring extra fuel to be brought up from Earth. It works like this. An electric power source is used to ionize fuel into plasma. Electric fields heat and accelerate the plasma while the magnetic fields direct the plasma in the proper direction as it is ejected from the engine, creating thrust for the spacecraft. The engine can even vary the amount of thrust generated, allowing it to increase or decrease its acceleration. It even features an "afterburner" mode that sacrifices fuel efficiency for additional speed. Possible fuels for the VASIMR engine could include hydrogen, helium, and deuterium. 

media type="custom" key="4527272"  it involves the contraction and expansion of space it works on the principal that the universe is constantly expanding and the warp drive exploits this action sending a spacecraft faster than light even though the ship technaly wont exead the speed of light. The following formula (Einstein field equation), based on general relativity, theoretically permits the travel of an object at a greater velocity than that of light, provided that space-time is curve d:   //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">G //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;">μν  <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 110%;"> is the Einstein curvature tensor, which describes the curvature in space, while the constant //G// without indices is Newton's gravitational constant. Hypothetically, if space-time is warped properly, the velocity of the traveling object does not technically exceed the speed of light, even though they appear to be moving faster than light to observers in normal space-time <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 64.68%;">. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 95%;">In 2007, physicist Richard Obousy proposed that a warp drive could be created by directly manipulating the extra dimensions of string theory. His idea suggests the expansion of space-time is a consequence of the vacuum ground-state of higher dimensional graviton fluctuations. The vacuum energy equations can be expressed as: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt;"> <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 6pt; line-height: 115%;">media type="custom" key="4534510" .