NASA Mission to Mars may take 30 days
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Given that the record for power produced by a fusion reactor is 16 megawatts (not enough for the bus home from work), and that the reactor that produced it takes up a large chunk of Oxford, you'll forgive me for being somewhat dubious about the guy's extravagant claims.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I did a search to try to find some actual reasonable explanations of how this might work (the entire craft) and couldn't find anything. The article mentions solar panels which I suspect is non-feasible given that it ignores the return trip along with the impact of acceleration on them. I also wonder about shielding, actual fuel usage and containment and failure scenarios for the entire thing. The article closes with a flippant passing note on the long term impact. However the real impact if such a vehicle existed would be in the Earth to Moon trip. Unless of course it is just so vastly expensive to build and maintain that it becomes just another Spruce Goose.
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Clever People[^] constantly amaze me. A one month trip to Mars? It used to take longer than that to get to Australia!
--------------------------------- I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^]
Put "Could" in a headline and you can make just about any claim.
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I did a search to try to find some actual reasonable explanations of how this might work (the entire craft) and couldn't find anything. The article mentions solar panels which I suspect is non-feasible given that it ignores the return trip along with the impact of acceleration on them. I also wonder about shielding, actual fuel usage and containment and failure scenarios for the entire thing. The article closes with a flippant passing note on the long term impact. However the real impact if such a vehicle existed would be in the Earth to Moon trip. Unless of course it is just so vastly expensive to build and maintain that it becomes just another Spruce Goose.
Yup. Looks to me like the guy's got himself a 600k pay-packet for drawing a few diagrams and writing a few reports. Not bad for a day's work.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!