A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve.
The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year.
To be clear, the concept currently doesn't exist much beyond calculations on paper, so we can't get too excited just yet.
Still, it's attracted attention not only because of its potential to get us into interstellar space within a human lifetime – something that traditional, chemical-fueled rockets can't – but also because it claims it can do so with much larger crafts.
"This proposal examines a new propulsion architecture for fast transit of heavy (1 ton and more) payloads across the Solar System and to interstellar medium," explains the lead researcher behind the proposal, aerospace engineer Artur Davoyan from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The pellet-beam concept was partly inspired by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is working on a 'light-sail' propulsion system. With the help of millions of lasers, a tiny probe would theoretically be able to sail to neighboring Proxima Centauri in just 20 years.
The new proposal starts with a similar idea – throw fuel at a rocket instead of blast it out of one – but it looks at how to shift larger objects. After all, a small probe isn't necessarily what we need if we want to one day explore, or colonize, the worlds outside our Solar System ourselves.
To work, the conceptual propulsion system requires two spacecraft – one that sets off for interstellar space, and one that goes into orbit around Earth.
The spacecraft orbiting Earth would shoot a beam of tiny microscopic particles at the interstellar spacecraft. READ MORE...
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