New Calculations Show That an Interstellar Bussard Ramjet Drive Would Need a Magnetic Field Stretching 150 Million Kilometres - Universe Today universetoday storybywill
. These concepts were answers to the fundamental challenges of achieving the kind of velocities needed to reach another star system in a relatively short amount of time. In other words, they would need to get up to a fraction of the speed of light
While an Orion spacecraft could theoretically achieve 10% the speed of light, hundreds to thousands of nuclear devices would be needed to do it. This, in turn, required a very large spacecraft and lots of external rocket boosters to get it into space, all of which added up to a prohibitive price tag. There was also the problem of radioactive fallout, which an Orion spacecraft would leave a trail of in its wake.
Nine years later, the magnetic field would be described theoretically for the first time in a paper titled “” – authored by MIT researcher John F. Fishback. Since that time, the idea has generated a great deal of interest from fans of science fiction and members of the technical and astronautical community. Said Peter Schattschneider in a recent TU Wien“The idea is definitely worth investigating.
– the magnetic field would need to be 4000 km in diameter. Even worse, the field would need to be 150 million km long to adequately capture and funnel ISM material into the ship’s fusion reaction. This is equivalent to the distance between the Sun and Earth, also known as one Astronomical Unit .
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