Can we build true starships for in system flight?

Question

I see ton of sci-fi books with ideas on this yet why have we not tried to biuld on? Or for that matter why did we stop going to the moon instead of build ing up form ther the means to make said space craft? I hear money is the big reson why. But I dont belive that as we spend so much on other useless projects and such. That I would think space craft and their support bases would lead to jobs and new area to live.

Answer 1

The short answer is: No, not in any useful sense. The reason: propulsion. We know of no way to propel a spacecraft except by ejecting mass at high velocity from it. The momentum imparted to the spacecraft equals the momentum imparted to the ejected mass -- that is, the amount of mass times the velocity. The hook is this: you have to buy momentum, which increases linearly with velocity, but what you have to spend to get it is energy, which increases with the square of velocity. To get a spacecraft which could navigate about the solar system at reasonable speed requires so much energy that nuclear power must be used. I did a pencil design of such a craft using a thermonuclear fusion reactor (we have no idea how to build one); the energy involved is on the order of terawatts. (The total electric generating capacity of the United States is just under one terawatt.) Obviously, interstellar travel is out of the question.

Answer 2

If we truly want to advance as a race then the idea that everything is about money needs to be abandoned. If money wasn't in the equation along with a host of other things such as power, greed, national and international boundaries. People looking at the small picture instead of the bigger picture plus the fact that people who do have money and power cant be trusted with it. If we could control all these factors with no violence and get rid of religious zealots who keep people under the thumb . We might then be able to focus resources and time and energy into these projects and come up with a realistic answer. Until that day which I don't think will happen in generations to come I think we will be playing that same old tune.


Ozjason76

Answer 3

The time may come when man will build starships. But there are a myriad of problems to be worked out. How will we find a fuel delivery system capable of powering an engine to near light speed? What will we have to do to develop materials for a starship to withstand the heat and friction traveling at near light speed will generate when entering any type of atmosphere? Do we even know where to start on these first two? And these are simple observations; there is far more to be answered than these. Sci-fi makes reality sound easy, but that is all fiction is supposed to do. It really gives no real answers...

Answer 4

Much of the space funding in the past has not be "useless" in my opinion. Though space travel is a wonderful thing, it depends on knowledge of other things in space. Currently one major obstacle are cosmic rays-this problem has been discovered because of research and will be answered with such. Yes progress should be made towards improved space flight, and we may have progress. But please not at the expense of other research. I believe it would be much more wonderful to discover an exosolar planet like the earth or to make new findings about physics than to travel far and wide knowing only what we know now.

Answer 5

We have a working version of the Ion drive but its still not powerfull enough for moving people and materials around " in system".
We stopped going to the moon because we were on the throes of a recession and we had achieved the goals President Kennedy had set.
No one gov. has all the resorces needed for such a mission as you describe and getting the citizens of enough governments to agree on said mission would be virtualy imposable at this time.
Private industry is the key to making it all happen in a global economy such as ours is turning into.

Answer 6

We will be able to eventually, but we don't have the technology yet. The space shuttle is like the Model T of spacecraft. NASA is not headed in the right direction, the Crew Exploration Vehicle which will be the replacement for the shuttle is hardly a spacecraft at all. It will be up to the private sector or countries besides the US to build the starships of the future.

Answer 7

lol its all about marketing baby as the demand arises for there to b space flight it will come but until then we must rely on nasa and ohter privately funded space flights but as of now it costs $10,000 for each pound of mass that we put into space but as for intergalatic flight thats a good question but as you may discover it is highly impossible to travel through deep space left to our modern devices the only way to do that would b a wormhole which is only beging to come into play unless of course alont of scientists were wrong about the assumptions made about the universe have you ever heard of e=mc2 well it pretty much says the we cant travel faster than the speed of light and if we did our mass would become infinite but i believe that statement to b false

Answer 8

Starship purely? Miracles did you already know, and that i'm not cracking you in this, that We outfitted This city become voted the worst rock and roll music of all time? i'm serious. I dont believe that. yet you could seem it up.

Answer 9

We don't have the technology yet. Look how much trouble we are having going to Mars. There are so many factors to consider, and very little knowledge in doing so.

Answer 10

Sadly, it just is not as easy to do as it is to imagine.