Once upon a time the military said "We want to use nukes and go to Saturn." NASA said "No way."
So the military worked on doing it anyway.
The ship would have been as big as a skyscraper and would literally use thousands of nuclear bombs to propel it on its journey to Saturn.
As it looked more promising, NASA basically said 'lol this looks promising, let us take over from here' and then they canceled the program and tried to destroy it.
But what if they hadn't?
First of all, there were hundreds of hurtles for them to overcome before it would have even been possible. And even if they did, who in their right mind would volunteer to sit on top of a giant rocket that was about to get nuked a couple dozen times?
Still, if they had, it would've no doubt ushered in a new era of space exploration. To hell with the moon, we'd be able to explore our entire solar system in person. The massive spaceships would have been large enough to carry the equipment to build colonies, biodomes, terraforming equipment. They were close to doing it back then, with todays advances we could have probably become quite the spacefaring civilization by now.
Instead we're still stuck on one rock. I guess if we destroy this one there's always - oh wait. This is the only planet we have. Nevermind.
Showing posts with label atomic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atomic. Show all posts
June 4, 2009
November 19, 2008
Anti-Matter Reactors
Apparently, a lab in California recently discovered a way to make massive amounts of antimatter. The antimatter is a significant enough amount that using the technique, they expect they will be able to finally begin making great strides in antimatter research.
Antimatter reactions release tons of energy, and just a tiny bit can release energy equivalent to giant nuclear weapons. So far I don't think we know how to tap that energy but now we can cheaply create enough to do some experiments on.
In the future, a single anti-matter reactor could power entire countries. And since antimatter destroys itself during the process and turns into regular matter, clean up is easy. We could have just stepped into the greatest clean-energy source in the universe.
Cool.
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Antimatter reactions release tons of energy, and just a tiny bit can release energy equivalent to giant nuclear weapons. So far I don't think we know how to tap that energy but now we can cheaply create enough to do some experiments on.
In the future, a single anti-matter reactor could power entire countries. And since antimatter destroys itself during the process and turns into regular matter, clean up is easy. We could have just stepped into the greatest clean-energy source in the universe.
Cool.
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