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loudmax • yesterday at 4:58 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Since we're already in the realm of far out engineering, you could get the energy from a laser beam from a source orbiting the sun. Your spaceship would have some kind of array to capture the energy beam.

This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.

In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.


Replies

stouset • yesterday at 5:48 PM

As you get going further and faster, this energy redshifts further and further making it less and less useful. Also there’s of course the problem of focusing a laser with that amount of energy tightly enough on an object increasingly far away.

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m4rtink • yesterday at 5:03 PM

So there is also the idea of a ramjet that uses interstellar hydrogen as fuel for fusion, which provides energy & propulsion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet

Some recent findings do give it lower feasibility though.

__MatrixMan__ • yesterday at 5:08 PM

Another option is to visit as many massive objects as possible on the way there, doing gravitational slingshots until you're half way, and then gravitational brakes on the approach. Of course now you're taking detours, but since certain amounts of fuel make the trip impossible, any workaround at all is an improvement. What's an extra few thousand years between friends?

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