🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan6.190716.5077@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>I didn't get the impression that that was what he meant.  After all,
>if you have antimatter to use in heating the bulk of your exhaust
>products, why do you need fusion? ...

There have been serious proposals, actually, to use antiprotons to do
the heat-and-compress trick for fusion.  The machinery needed for this
is (probably) a whole lot lighter than for laser-ignited fusion, making
it much more practical for rocketry.

However, (a) proton-proton fusion is well beyond what this technique can
easily achieve, and (b) Fred is correct, that wasn't what I was talking
about.

>yuou couldn't cruise forever, but I wouldn't think it would require
>amounts of anti-matter that would seem ridiculously large, given the
>scale of such a vehicle.

Kilogram quantities of antimatter are quite adequate for early interstellar
probes, given modest vehicles.  I don't have numbers for the antimatter-
fuelled ramjet on hand, but it *has* been studied and it looks plausible.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry