Space Speeds:
Did you know that in space, one of NASA's space rockets can travel about 30,000
miles/hour. This is an example of a space probe or satellite. A manned shuttle
would be much heavier an more unrealistic to accelerate to those speeds.
For your wallet: It costs
between four-hundred and fifty and five-hundred million dollars to send a
shuttle into space.
Sitting around:
The journey from the Earth to the moon in Apollo 10 takes about 70 hours!
Captain,
the antimatter injectors: It turns out that the idea of
using antimatter for propulsion is not completely science fiction. Some of NASA
affiliates are entertaining the idea anyway. The main idea behind using antimatter
as a source of energy has to do with the fact that mass is energy. In nuclear
power plants, what they do essentially is put two atoms together. (Nuclear Fission)
The weird thing is that the mass of the two combined is a little less then if
you added them up separately. What happens is the missing mass is converted
directly into photon energy, which is something like light. This reaction puts
off ridiculous amount of energy and the mass differential (the missing mass)
is a very very small percentage of the entire mass of the atoms. Well, antimatter
is just like matter with a reversed charge. For example an atom of antimatter
contains a positron (an electron with a positive charge). The crazy thing is
that when antimatter and matter collide, they are both converted completely
into energy. As you can imagine this yields very high amounts of energy. The
only problem is that it is very difficult to make antimatter in a world made
of matter; as soon as it exists it obliterates itself and a piece of matter.
This would be the driving energy of a rocket that could something like this: