The Hypothetical Possibilities of Space Travel

Space drives weather fictitious or theoretical, will be playing a an important part in space exploration in the next couple of decades. Although governments seem to tighten their budgets, the private sector will see it as an business opportunity to boldly go where no franchise has gone before. Establishing a tourist rides seems fairly simple considering aeroplane technology can provide some height. The rest of the journey is then provided by hybrid jet to a low earth orbit as described on virgin Galactic travel description.

The success of these travel excursions will hopefully filter down on perhaps the research and development. Already reaction engines a new company has plans to create a new type of rocket the rock provides the duality of atmospheric air travel as a normal jet engine, as well as the contained components of a rocket engine. The secret to the engine is cooling system as with any craft leaving the atmosphere they need to reach hypersonic speeds. A task quite difficult as any air intake at those speeds reach a temperature 1000 degrees, which is unsuitable for a normal jet engines air supply. Instead a special cooling system and extra plumbing to change a engine from atmospheric breathing to contained oxygen hydrogen mix is required. The engine still is in testing stages for its pre-cooler, but if give an unlimited budget the Skylon plane still wont be ready until ten years time.
The possibility of a orbiting engine still gives us hope that progress is continuing, although ten years is a long time to wait for cheap space travel.

Further inconvenience of zero gravity and no atmosphere will create more problems, as propulsion to distant celestial objects would required something more then chemical propulsion. According to NASA physicist Harold White, by placing a spheroid object between two regions of space-time one expanding, the other contracting. Alcubierre theorized you could create a “warp bubble” that moves space-time around the object, effectively re-positioning it. In essence, you’d have the end result of faster-than-light travel without the object itself having to move (with respect to its local frame of reference) at light-speed or faster. The only catch: Alcubierre says that, “just as happens with wormholes,” you’d need “exotic matter” (matter with “strange properties”) to distort space-time. And the amount of energy necessary to power that would be on par with the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

White, who just shared his latest ideas at the 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposium, says that if you adjust the shape of the ring surrounding the object, from something that looks like a flat halo into something thicker and curvier, you could power Alcubierre’s warp drive with a mass roughly the size of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe.
In other words: reduction in energy requirements from a planet with a mass equivalent to over 300 Earths, down to an object that weighs just under 1,600 pounds.
What’s more, if you oscillate the space warp, White claims you could reduce the energy load even further. Theoretically exotic matter provide some solution, but that would require the faith of recreating the fictional warp engines. Using antimatter and matter as a controlled explosion in a dilithium crystal matrix to possibly make exotic matter. Although it is impossible now
Dr. White's team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have "initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble" using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.
As well as regressing to star-trek physics, the alternative is nuclear power source to provide substantial electrical power for a plasma drive. The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is an electro-magnetic thruster for spacecraft propulsion. It uses radio waves to ionize and heat a propellant, and magnetic fields to accelerate the resulting plasma to generate thrust. It is one of several types of spacecraft electric propulsion systems.
The method of heating plasma used in VASIMR was originally developed as a result of research into nuclear fusion. VASIMR is intended to bridge the gap between high-thrust, low-specific impulse propulsion systems and low-thrust, high-specific impulse systems. VASIMR is capable of functioning in either mode. Costa Rican scientist and former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz created the VASIMR concept and has been working on its development since 1977.
Plasma provides a decent enough propulsion material for traveling to planets around the solar system, as a trip to Mars will probably take 5 or 6 weeks instead of a year for conventional rockets.

The construction of a nuclear reactor on earth is roughly $14.5 billion according to the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station price tag. The engineering and construction problems from a reactor would increase in problematic difficulties at zero gravity. The possible solution is a contained capsule similar to a thorium reactor  which would reduce build cost to 1 billion dollars. Also the safely aspects of a reactor would not overheat and cause a Fukushima incident in space. Additionally the shielding for such a craft can be economically placed in the living quarters.
Alternatively, cold fusion which has been mistakenly disregarded has resurfaced to allow a hypothetically a cheap solution, the construction of a cold fusion cell.

Dr. Focardi has been publishing strong results with nickel-hydrogen fusion since 1994. A 1996 paper reported two cells that ran 300 days producing 250 and 167 kilowatt-hours of excess heat. Andrea Rossi is an inventor and businessman who hired Dr. Focardi in 2007 as a consultant. He has been financing the entire development with his own money. Rossi's design uses a nickel powder with catalysts instead of nickel sheets. It is therefore capable of producing much more power. In 2010 they jointly published a paper that reported six different experiments with durations of up to 52 days. The longest experiment used 19 kWh of energy input to produce 3768 kWh of output energy. Although it is a long way for the 200,000 kw required for a plasma engine.
While Hot Fusion is a distant possibility with the slow construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ready in 2020. It is ruled out for the foreseeable future as a contender for space applications, (my own future).
Instead consider the possibility of heat pipe technology, which was invented at Los Alamos in 1963. A team of NASA and Department of Energy researchers has shown that a reliable nuclear reactor based on technology several decades before.
The experiment known as the Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions, or DUFF, is the first demonstration of a space nuclear reactor system to produce electricity in the United States since 1965, and the experiment confirms basic nuclear reactor physics and heat transfer for a simple, reliable space power system.
A heat pipe is a sealed tube with fluid inside that can efficiently transfer heat produced by a reactor with no moving parts. In the mid-1980s, Los Alamos developed a lithium heat pipe that transferred heat energy at a power density of 23 kilowatts per square centimeter—to understand the intensity of that amount of heat energy, consider that the heat emitted from the sun's surface is only 6 kilowatts per square centimeter. Lithium is placed inside a molybdenum pipe, which can operate at white-hot temperatures approaching 1,477 K (2,200°F). Once heated inside the pipe, the lithium vaporizes and carries heat down the pipe's length.
In 1996, the space shuttle Endeavor carried into space three Los Alamos heat-pipe prototypes. The designs of these liquid-metal prototypes were for use in advanced spacecraft. The pipes operated at temperatures in excess of 900°F, and performed flawlessly in all tests. In 2000, Los Alamos worked with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in developing heat pipes to generate electricity and propulsion in spacecraft designed to journey to the solar system's outer limits. Because heat pipes work efficiently in zero gravity environments, routine applications for them are to cool electronic elements aboard geostationary communication satellites.

Propulsion other then warp drives can be achieved, the only drawback is money and resources. For practicable travel into our solar system the plasma engine would require 200,000 kw. Besides the impracticable use of an extension cord to a space craft. The only solution is a contained nuclear reactor generating 0.2 gigawatt's of electrical power. Thorium reactors though theoretically possible is quite expensive at 1 billion dollars, and not really designed for zero gravity. While heat pipes and cold fusion may sound promising, experiments will still need to be scaled up to test for power generating at plasma engine levels. Current technology or a forward thinking drive may get us sooner. But for now expect very slow progress for then ten or so years until some form of space orbiting infrastructure has been established by space tourism. Although it is slow progress for space propulsion drives, there is still new innovative ideas which might emerge to help generate, store or transmit power. The future might have unforeseeable solutions, you just have to wait and see...

Is it Star trek?, not really

It looks like Gene Roddenberry has already thought of the plans to equip the space ships of the future. From a 60's Tv series to todays emerging technological ideas. If I didn't know better people are trying to mimic fictional ideas subconsciously, to bring together a working system no matter if it is real or not.
consider the quantum teleportation space race where by countries around the world are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication. This is not a maybe-sort-of-one-day quantum technology. Quantum teleportation has been proven experimentally many times over and researchers are now eyeing the heavens as their next big leap forward. Most of what remains are the nuts and bolts engineering challenges ( before it becomes a thing of the present.
Though it may be disappointing to hear, quantum teleportation is not about instantly sending a person or object between two places. Instead, the technique involves the quantum entanglement, where by if a pair of photons was to be separated at large distances effecting one will effect the other. The longest distance so far for teleportation is 101 km with a photon source in the middle, the end receivers can send information.
In the past year, a team from China and another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open air over 60 and 89 miles, respectively. This is many times farther than the previous record of 10 miles, set in 2010 by the same Chinese team. With scientists extending quantum teleportation to such distances, many are already considering the next step: zapping particles and information from an orbiting satellite to a relay station on Earth.

If developed, quantum teleportation satellites could allow spies to pass large amounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers – which would be smaller and exponentially more powerful than modern computers, able to model complex phenomenon, rapidly crunch numbers, and render modern encryption keys useless – they would need quantum teleporters in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the internet. China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payload in 2016 and the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years.

Meanwhile a team based at the University of Southern California, being sponsored by Razer. The team is also developing a game to show off the setup called Wild Skies, which will require players to fly an airship and also engage in a little combat using swords and guns. They plan to go on the road with their Holodeck system, hitting venues like Maker Faire in the near future. The equipment included is Oculus Rift head-mounted display, which is a head tracking system equipped with monitors for the eyes. The system seems like a cut down version of the gadget shows Battlefield simulator, instead Project Holodeck is intended for mass production for people to have in their homes.
As well as the possibilities of future tech there are far fetched ideas that people are working on, like Dr Harold White of NASA's Johnson Space Center. Using a White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer a warp coil " which looks like a magnetic coil loop, will attempt to warp a laser beam in a sensitive interferometer array. Any warp in space with move the laser and the slight movement will change the light pattern. But laughing aside the magnetic field moving light experiment seems to me like a waste of any body's time. But still the theory of a real-life warp drive as first discussed in scientific terms in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, seem plausible and is worth keeping in mind.

As well as warp drive there is an impulse drive powered by nuclear reactors, which seem to capture peoples attention lately. Ross Cortez, an aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate at UAH’s Aerophysics Research Center, looking for the ‘Holy Grail’ of rocket propulsion system.
To hit this phenomenal speed, the researchers are investigating something called z-pinch fusion as a source of propulsion. Cortez says the technique takes a cylindrical array of super-thin lithium wires and puts a massive electric current through them. The electricity—millions of amps are being sent through the wires in 100 nanosecond pulses, which could produce 3 terawatts of output power—creates a magnetic field around the array and vaporizes the wires to form plasma.
The magnetic field pinches the plasma until it collapses on a core of deuterium and lithium, which they hope will cause its atoms to fuse and result in a massive release of energy. “What we’re aiming for is to get enough compression and heat in the z-pinch implosion to cause the fusion fuel to react,” Cortez says. “With the energy that would release, we could get millions of pounds of thrust out the back of this thing—on the order of Saturn-V-class thrust.”
Z pinch machines have yet to break even the energy taken from the out, compared to energy put into the system. Nuclear fusion is not a reliable power source yet as the enormous temperatures need to heat the plasma cant be contained my a magnetic field.
The best idea or experiment for a reactor is the The ITER fusion reactor, with self correcting  plasma shape system, which wont be built until 2019. The down side as well is that it's not even a Z pinch design but a round donut shape.
The best idea for a thrust system in space beside the inefficient oxygen hydrogen rockets, is a plasma thrust (Vasimir) system. This requires a lot of power at least 200 megawatts, which cant be provided by solar or any current battery technology. Nasa reluctance to use Nuclear power, means that decent space travel will be limited to chemical propulsion. Star-trek ideas however you look at it, seems to be making its mark to shaping a future. Whether or not we get the same idealized future is anyones guess. But similar gadgets like the Universal translator, the tablet, handheld communicators, Bionic eyes, telepresence, transparent aluminum and hypo spray are working into our lives right now!!!. Without a some guide from science fiction, I would guess technology would grow and evolve naturally. But my suspicions would conclude that science would probably change at a slower rate without Sci Fi...