We Are Hardly Even at The Beginning of Space Travel Well, it is finally happening, Blue Origin is finally launching its New Glenn Rocket after some 10 years later. Most of us know SpaceX has a tremendous lead on them, but they are vowing to catch up. The New Glenn has two stages and is a heavy lift rocket which is said to be reusable, not everything on the entire two stages is reusable however. As a matter of fact, SpaceX is moving to make more stages of their rockets reusable. I am always happy to see more American space companies coming online. The more the merrier I say. I feel this way because the competition will have them come up with new technology. I believe it is only a matter of time before NASA gets out of any part it has with the building of rockets. The exception might be the military, but we will have to wait and see with that. The first launch was called off at the time with no new date announced, but I am expecting we will hear more in not too long a time. One of the more interesting things I heard was the rocket was designed to land on a barge, sound familiar? Update: The New Glenn rocket has made it to orbit. New Glenn is starting off a little behind the Falcon 9 from SpaceX as that rocket can lift 64 tons into low orbit while the New Glenn has a limit of about 45 tons. We also have to remember the Falcon 9 is the biggest rocket in SpaceX’s quiver. Even bigger is the Starship which should be ready soon. The two different rockets use different fuel mixtures. If we look back in history at the steam engine era, we will notice the effort to build more powerful steam engines was manifested in size. The bigger the engine, the more powerful the engine. There seems to be something similar going on in rocket technology. Our answer right now for more powerful rockets is bigger rockets. The steam engines were mostly replaced with the internal combustion engine and rocket engines will be replaced too when we figure out a better system for powering spacecraft. The formula for making money on launches for some of the new startups is making launches cheaper for getting your package into orbit. They do this by building smaller. The idea is why pay for a large rocket launch if you have a small payload? There seems to be a place in the pyramid for these types of rockets as long as we don’t see the market for these launches over saturated. If we really want to get somewhere in space exploration, we need to find a way to travel many times the speed of light. I never believed even if we figured out how to fold space, say with a warp engine, this would be safe to use. Think about all the damage we might do to those objects in the space we folded and all that force we would be pushing forward which could destroy our destination when we stopped. There was even an episode of one of the Star Treks which talked about an area of space where it was forbidden to use the warp drive because the area was getting damaged. Maybe more effort should be put into examining the universe for unknown forces and yes even known ones. Maybe we could use a black hole to power our ships. If we could figure out how to capture some of their power or to create and confine a small one to power a ship, we might have all the power we would ever need. Yes, I know all about the so-called limits on speed, but science has been wrong before. There is also the question about adapting anti-matter to use for power. One of the problems is we have only been able to produce a very tiny amount in years. It has been said anti-matter could propel a space craft to near light speed. I wonder if there is some way we could boost the power, using a sort of cosmic supercharger. Anyway, even if we could only get to near light speed, it would certainly help in exploring our solar system, wouldn’t it? We wouldn’t have to look at round trips to the planets taking years. It has been said a flight to Neptune, using current technology, could take up to 13 years. I don’t believe any human will be going there at that rate. What I am waiting for is that big announcement from one of the new aerospace companies which might say we have figured out how to travel in space much faster. So, the announcements of new types of power have all been what I call baby steps. I am going to tell you how I feel about things, please don’t laugh. We should be able to reach the moon in no more than a couple of hours, Mars in a day or two. These would make space travel in our solar system a lot more practical. To reach Mars in 2 days we need our spacecraft to reach 1.7 percent the speed of light. To get to the moon in 2 hours we need our spacecraft to reach the speed of 0.012 percent of light speed. Even at this speed we could reach Mars in about 17.6 days. My question is would it be possible in the future to use light itself to power our spacecraft and reach almost light speed? Solar sails use light but I am talking of perhaps a powerful laser. There is no resistance in space so light will exert a push. Unfortunately, right now we don’t have this technology ready, but if perfected, it is estimated this could propel a spacecraft up to 20 percent of light speed. There is a probe being worked on to do just this from project Breakthrough Starshot. The idea is to launch a probe to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system. It is theoretically possible to reach it at this speed in almost 22 years. It is about 4.37 light-years away. If Voyager 1 was headed in the right direction it would reach that system in about 75,000 years. All this just proves how we are only at the very beginning in space travel. It turns out the first boats traveling the oceans of earth could eventually reach their destinations far quicker than we can get to even Alpha Centauri at the moment. To get to Mars in 2 day your spacecraft would have to reach 1.7 percent of the speed of light.
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