A better way to get to space: Dr. Michael Kelzenberg at TEDxWSU 2014
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 มิ.ย. 2014
- Externally powered thermal rockets differ from chemical rockets in that they directly heat a low molecular weight propellant such as hydrogen, and are thus limited only by the amount of heat that can be imparted to the working fluid. One way of providing heat to a thermal rocket is by wirelessly beaming it, as microwave energy, from the ground. This type of propulsion will offer a ten-fold improvement in payload fraction over existing chemical propulsion systems, and exciting progress is being made to turn this concept into a reality. In fact, the utility of electromagnetic power beaming isn't limited to space launch rockets. By developing safe, efficient power beaming systems, it is possible to deliver electricity to flying unmanned aircraft systems, enabling a new generation of sustainably powered flight. In an age where wireless communications are ubiquitous, and where electric cars are becoming commonplace on our roadways; it is not difficult to foresee a future in which wireless energy transfer will revolutionize the way we access the skies and beyond.
Bio- Michael Kelzenberg is a Lead Research Engineer at Escape Dynamics Inc. He leads the UAV Power Systems group, which is developing novel rectenna technologies and power management systems for efficient, wirelessly powered aircraft. Michael received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2010, where he worked in the research group of Professor Harry Atwater. His graduate research focused on the development of high-performance silicon microwire photovoltaics, including their growth, fabrication, characteri-zation, and simulation. In 2010, he co-founded Caelux Corp. in Pasadena CA, to continue development of novel photovoltaic technologies. Michael's current research interests include renewable energy, solar cells, rectennas, wireless power beaming, and power management.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
At least he went beyond just talking... he actually tried. Someday he or someone like him will succeed
I will succeed , i hv the other way out
I like his slide showing the saturn IV rocket
When i first heard about this i thought it was crazy, however i watched an excellent interview on the youtube channel TMRO and they convinced me. They made the whole thing sound like a great alternative.
Unfortunately they ran out of money and couldnt get any backers to continue. I hope some company comes after them and takes over. It would be a shame for their work to go to waste.
can you please send Me the link or thuMbnail of the interview!!!!
sell to spacex
Escape Dynamics of Broomfield, Colorado, announced on its website recently that it decided to wind down its operations because its “external propulsion” technology was not attractive enough to potential investors to fund its continued development.
well done. I enjoyed that...
Sounds great. Let's do it.
Are you guys hiring? I don't have any qualifications but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Not "are you guys hiring?" But more like "Are you guys high?"
Joseph S there trying to get government dollars to put in their pocket with years and years of funding. BS!
Joseph S I second that! It's a very cool concept!
seems legit
I don't have any quallies either. In fact I can't read or Wright. But I now what a soda can is :)
At the equivalent of 3 tons methane burning per second, we have 46,5 GW. Even with a receptor area of 465 square meters, we are still at 100 MW per square meter. Sounds more like an energy weapon than a propulsion system.
That is a tendency of high energy solutions to problems
Come at us, Aliens!
Think on the prime directive: No contact is allowed with primitive civilizations.
Manu, that is true for non directional waves. Something like a laser's intensity is much less dependent on distance.
If used as an energy weapon, it's one that could be defeated by aluminum foil, would be big enough to be useless for any emplacement smaller than an aircraft carrier, and only useful against flying targets within line of sight.
In other words, nowhere near worth the price tag.
I really like this video. I'm watching it regularly.
Would make a great weapon!!!! but this way of thinking is what i love about science keep it up !!!
Would make a TERRIBLE weapon. It would be very big, very expensive, and only effective against targets that are within line of sight and are strong microwave absorbers. That excludes almost everything you'd want to point it at.
Company is defunct, and ceased business in December 2015.
The question he didn't answer is why does it need to be powered from the ground? With the increase in efficiency why not place a suitable generator on the craft and power it locally? A nuclear reactor would be perfect for the use he is referring to and it would provide power for the crew as well. Imagine a large tank of water with a nuclear powered electrolysis device on board. You pipe the gasses released to the microwave and power the microwave itself from the same power source. Main difficulties would be to provide radiation shielding for the crew and make the reactor reliable. Also to make the pipes corrosion proof and be careful of back blasts. The benefits would outweigh the difficulties in my opinion.
Laser propulsion can adjust satellites within twenty feet once the satellite is in orbit but pushing it farther is difficult, and tougher through some of earth's gravity. The smaller the satellite the easier laser propulsion can adjust it say over eastern hemisphere instead of northern and no fuel was wasted.
He went to the Shatner School of Public . Speaking.
LOL!
Their company folded 18 months later(Founded 2010 -> Defunct December 31, 2015)
feels bad man
Dukky Drake But why? His explanation was good and the idea is sound. I don't know why they wouldn't succeed.
@Verisimilitude Dude
Guess-They ran out of funding.
Ted talks are usually used as a vehicle to attract funding when all else fails. Lots of ideas are feasible, but most will never be engineered due to a lack of funding. This isn't something you can put together in your shed on the weekends, aerospace engineers dont usually work for scale.
ATTWATER hasn't folded yet or they got additional funding to continue. Look at their website, Given the fact that UAV are also used in military that could be a reason to go silent if they are close to success. I can see a lot of opportunities for military to have drones allways flying and coming down for maintenance only. Also, not all research do succeed and they may have failed. Anyhow didn't see any publication from that researcher in the last years. only hint is the fact he is still senior researcher in Attfield.
The company "Escape Dynamics, Inc", which was created out of that research group to commercialize microwave propulsion, is the entity that folded.
Kelzenberg simply went back to doing research at caltech, i'm willing to bet he is no longer perusing microwave propulsion in any capacity.
"The Atwater group is engaged in interdisciplinary research focusing on solid state physics, device physics and materials science issues and phenomena of functional materials and devices."
I quite like this idea
At room temp hydrogen moves at 1,754 m/s rather than 585 m/s for water
so if you can get it to the same temperature (not easy) you would have 3 times the exhaust velocity.
if liquid rockets are 4400 m/s then this could be over 13 km/s an exhaust velocity faster than the velocity you need the rocket to reach low earth orbit 9.4km/s so less than 50% of the mass would be needed 50% * 9.4/13 gives 36% but the average weight during launch would be the weight after using half the fuel so if you adjust to make the average weight 100% you start with 118% of the weight you did have with 36/118 fuel
so potentially you would only need 36/1.18 % fuel only about 30.6% fuel and mostly payload.
A beamed microwave like that would also be a very powerful weapon. The lilit would be the powersupply, but with expected advancedments in batteries and capasitators should you could make a very strong and mobil version based on the generator technology described in this talk.
Just a reminder that any advancement in tech that deals with high power have many uses.
Actually, it would make a pretty terrible weapon, as it could be defeated by aluminum foil. Yes, it would be able to defeat specific targets (stealth aircraft would probably be particularly vulnerable), but there are easier, cheaper, and less target-specific ways to do exactly the same thing.
Also, making a mobile version of this would require dramatic improvements in a wide variety of technologies, most being pursued with great intensity for improving EV's and renewable energy. Just a reminder that just because an advancement in tech is scary doesn't mean it shouldn't be pursued ... and is often less scary than it initially appears, too.
The problem with all rockets including yours is that they start from a stand still. A giant electric rail gun like a train track that launches the rocket up a mountain would greatly reduce the amount of fuel needed in the first place, then your microwave system can kick in and further propel the rocket with a very large payload into space
While EM launch has a lot of potential as a kind of kick-starter for other launch systems (eg, getting a microwave rocket far enough off the ground for the beam-director to gain line of sight, or accelerating a ramjet up to working speeds), it's currently not a good candidate for a substitute first stage, for three main reasons:
1) There's no good place to put it. For it to be practical, you need a very tall mountain that has a suitably angled/structured slope, is close to the equator, reasonably accessible by ground/sea, and wouldn't subject thousands of residents to the window-shattering sound of a hypersonic launch. Compromising even one of those criteria would be very costly.
2) It's financially unsafe. No matter how much greater your payload fraction is, you're shooting multi-million-dollar hypersonic projectiles out of a multi-billion-dollar barrel that takes years to build. If anything goes wrong, EVER, you're unbelievably screwed.
3) It requires accelerating the vehicle to very high velocities at very low altitudes--even Mt. Everest is very low in this context--where the atmosphere is very dense and will therefore apply a lot more pressure and heat to the vehicle's skin, probably far more than reentry. Whatever you save on propellant you'll likely spend on structure and thermal protection.
Overall, with technology and economics as they are, it just doesn't make sense to actively pursue EM launch. There are better places to put the severely limited research dollars.
Spin Launch systems
Wow...just wow...this is the best Christopher Walken's TedX speech I ever listened to...
Have you tried the difference in expansion co-effient produced by ionising the propellant?
Didn't Nick Tesla invent direct wireless power that was his goal in a doc I watched?
Yep. That's what he meant when he said using existing technology. There's nothing original about his idea.
This idea hints of N. Tesla's broadcasting power through the air.
One of the biggest challenges to overcome is not the specific impulse of a rocket motor. It is radiation; specifically the effects of solar and cosmic radiation on the human body.
I have always loved the idea of SSTO's using air breathing engines for at least a decent part of the flight into orbit, and Skylon looks like it's not terribly far off now.
might as well jettison the air breathing mass once there isn't any atmosphere. then once you do that might as well use a 2 stage rocket. You can napkin math all this stuff and see why it isn't really a great idea.
@@JackMott rocket fuel is too heavy. Starting 1 metre above ground means you go 10 metre more before running out of fuel. If you can start burning rocket fuel higher, the gains are exponential.
great idea, now where can we get a 10 Gigawatt laser?
good video
the best way to get to space is the space elevator. unfortunately, the technologoy is not ready yet. basically, the whole problem is that we are unable to produce (in sufficiently large quantities) the material the cable will consist of. not even close to that... and the price of such a cable would be huge!
This was actually pretty interesting. But I noticed there's virtually no one in the crowd, or at least it appears that way. I hope someone like him figures it out. I am not smart enough.
I been reading up on this the Railguns technology . The tech is good but needs real investment . The technology would being down lanuching payloads into space and be faster . Florida and parts of Europe and Scotland have the bested land mass for this .I believe Railguns lanuch is the future of space lanuch 👍🏼
“While microwave propulsion is feasible and is capable of efficiency and performance surpassing chemical rockets, the cost of completing the R&D all the way through operations makes the concept economically unattractive for our team at this time,” the company stated in a brief note posted on its website
its the saturn V not the saturn IV
At what point in the future would the expelled hydrogen represent a problem to the atmosphere, or would it simply be lost to space at a steady-state Equilibrium?
I thought about using a inverted teardrop hydrogen balloon with a hollow middle where the rocket sits & as the balloon rises it expands because of the decrease in air pressure, it also gets colder so might not some of the hydrogen be converted into liquid fuel during this process?
I would like to give a Tedall about maturbating with marigolds. I'm so excited I can't type props
1/t just the frequecy of the propulsor and Y=Xpow(2)*cos(1/t,E) what you got to do with cold plasma to make cold plasma control the entropy of particule in the plasma with magnet ....
Just build a giant rail gun and lunch them into space lol.
Humans couldn’t survive such a journey, but you could send payloads like that super cheap
What about power transmission through fibre optics with microwaves?
high isp, and single stage to orbit sounds a lot less appealing when the hardware can land back and refuel quickly
This isn't necessarily my field of expertise, but if this method were ever used to carry passengers, would they not be exposed to tremendous amounts of microwave emission? Would this not negatively impact their health?
So far the cheapest, most multi-purpose, and matured technology transportation system to space and beyond is the Boeing-HASTOL concept (Formerly called "T(rans) A(tmospheric) P(iloted) L(ow)-O(rbiting) V(ehicle) or "TAPLOW /1977/.
Why not use Scalar or longitudinal waves for power transmission - a concept Tesla developed? Use the longitudinal component of Electromagnetic Radiation to carry or impart energy much more efficiently than microwaves? I'd recommend taking a look into Tesla's work in this area at least.
You guys should be working on a looped system that doesn't take a ground control unit to function. This seems unrealistic for anything in "space".
If I have a satellite orbiting at 75 miles carrying a tether 70 miles long which can catch a flying wing payload and bring it aboard the orbiter, I can put mass into orbit for the cost of an jet ride. Preferably a pulse jet for supersonic speeds. The pulse jet can use oxygen up to 100,000 ft. The orbiter can maintain its position through less forceful propulsion means than rocket power from the bottom of a gravity well.
Rocket scientists have been trying to increase Isp (specific impulse) values for decades with not a whole lot of success. Research the linear aerospike engine. It was a nice attempt at a much more efficient engine, but was abandoned due to being limited to using lighter weight composite materials for propellant tanks, which are prone to failure under high pressure. Not to mention the inefficiency at launch (sea level). A start-up company called ARCA is currently working on a SSTO (single stage to orbit) linear aerospike rocket, but they have yet to move beyond hydrogen peroxide as a propellant. Graphene technology could possibly change the whole course of rocketry due to its strength and light weight, resulting in much better velocities, payloads, and higher specific impulse engines. Time will tell.....
Not from the ground but from solar arrays, maybe a triangulation at first to combine there energy to lasers to propel light-ships away.
So, if you shoot a spacecraft with high power ground-based microwave beams to ignite hydrogen, what's preventing the crew from getting microwaved to death?
The hydrogen is not being ignited, it's being heated, but there's no oxygen present for it to combust with. The crew could easily be shielded in the same way a microwave oven is shielded.
It's called aiming the microwave gunsite
That's not the problem, the problem is the microwave ray will toast everything, the planes, birds, anything that intersects it. Think of a microwave oven turned inside out with the rays shooting all over the place. And that's a 800 W microwave oven, not a MEGAWATT one.
What do you think any rocket does to something it intersects with? Like they're launching rockets over the top of passing planes rofl. At least microwaves cannot accidentally fall on neighboring countries.
What's preventing you from dying after your first use of a microwave oven?
THE ELECTRO MAGNETIC LAUNCH SYSTEM. It use's rail gun tech. Can launch large volume and or weight into space , safley , low low cost.
Does this explain the flocks of birds falling out of the sky?
If the microwave sources that he uses to power the vessels heat the hydrogen to have such a powerful thrust, what does that do to the hydrogen in the atmosphere between the microwave sources and the target vessel?
The microwaves would primarily heat the heat sink, and the convection of the heat sink would superheat the hydrogen... if I understood the concept correctly
How high an orbit could Raytheon's system launch a vehicle into ?
What about using rail gun tech with rocket fuel for launch to reduce the rocket fuel that is needed to get a payload in orbit?
keimo Clayton yepp! but not for humans
On board electronics most likely can not withstand the EM wave generated by the gun fire even if it can bear that G force. And you still need a burn in orbit in order to stay there. But Yes it would be so cool to solve it.
Sci-Fi author Robert Heinlein posited such a system (and I don't think he was the first, just that he made it accessible to people's imaginations) in his 1966 book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. While, it COULD work for transporting people into space, I think such technologies would be far better at transporting construction materials (and pre-fabbed items) into space.
keimo Clayton -- Yes, in theory a Mass Driver (not Railgun) could be used for initial acceleration, perhaps replacing the 1st stage of a rocket. Much as I like it, there are several huge issues with that approach, and numerous trade-offs between cost and performance. To me, they look like pointing to a Launch Assist system which gives only Mach 1 to Mach 2, out of the Mach 25 needed to reach orbit. That gives a benefit of several percent, which could mean double or triple the payload to orbit, but it's an expensive system and it will not be used very often for many years. That is large financial problem.
keimo Clayton Watch what Elon Musk's Hyperloop evolves into.
This was 3 and a half years ago, where are they now? Laser ablation propulsion was tested about ten years ago using a spinning aluminum top design and a 100 watt co2 laser. It used pulses and shot it up about 100 feet. The problem is not only tracking but the loss of strength through humid atmosphere and clouds as well as the dispersion of the laser beam over a mile and before you know it you have a tenth of your original power. The solution is to bring the laser with the ship, bounce that light off the back of the ship. Nuclear power could do that. The same is true with Microwaves. Water absorbs radiation so it has a limited range, it disperses, and even if you could get a test ship up a few miles the cross section of the beam at that distance might be nine times bigger, rendering one ninth the power to the hydrogen. The solution once again seems to be to bring the microwave emmitters with the ship and power it with nuclear batteries.
Sounds pretty far out even for someone who studied large renewable energy power plants in geosynchronous orbit in 1975 at JPL and used a rectenna to convert the microwave beam back to electricity for distribution. I don't say this will never work but it sure has a ton of issues.
can we design an algorithm, that goes through all the chemical elements, and also use all possible mixtures of N elements, to figure out the most optimal mixture that generates the highest Specific Impulse value? for example, it could be a mixture of five chemicals.
That's not how propellant chemistry works, really, but to make a long story short, the highest Isp ever attained by a chemical rocket (and very close to the theoretical maximum) is about 540s, which is about 17% higher than the advertised Isp of the Space Shuttle's main engines. The propellant used molten lithium as fuel, liquid fluorine as oxidizer, liquid hydrogen to reduce the molecular weight of the exhaust, and straight-up insanity to get otherwise-brilliant people to attempt something so foolhardy.
The moral of the story is that even if you're willing to kill every living thing within a hundred miles of your launch site, you're not going to get anywhere near the reduction in launch costs necessary to really make a big impact in humanity's ability to explore, colonize, and industrialize space. For that, you need something completely different.
It may be that the research into microwave beams is currently more about weaponizing.
I know the test using artillery to achieve escape velocity failed but what about using railguns.....🤔🤔🤔
I wouldn't want to be an astronaut, when a high-energy Microwavebeam is pointing to me :-)
There have to be better ways.
Great talk - sorry to hear the company has been shutdown. I hope NASA looks into this technology in the future. My only negative comment, it took Dr. Kelzenberg 7 mins to get to his point...
I disagree. The context is quite essential for him to make his point
Heating hydrogen with microwaves. Is that even possible theoretically?
I thought you could only affect molecules with an electric momentum (like water).
Maybe I misunderstood but I thought he said they were heating the nozzle and the nozzle would then heat the hyrogen
Why use land based microwave? If you have 10x more load capacity, why not use a rocket based microwave source?
Why not construct some sort of electromagnetic network within the drones currently flying high above us in the sky we call "satellites" (which really use to be balloons, but are now solar powered drones that almost never need to return to earth's surface) as a way to pull a space bound vehicle upwards at the same time propelling from the ground upwards with use of a type extremely high powered magnetic rail gun. With a secondary set of magnetic drone networks set to push forwards and out once passed initial upwards pulling drones. That way the vehicle does not need to exert any of its mass or payload to the upwards momentum (only in the magnetic timing field polarization of its hull from pull to repell when needed).
But then you run into the issue of passing through the firmament and what not which is very much so not viablly possible unless there is a opening or crack in it to safely pass through without impacting and becoming debris after impacting, exploding and falling back to surface of our planet.
You have several very difficult and fundamental challenges in doing beam-powered propulsion from Earth to Space. First, the beam has to work at both close range and long range, and the atmosphere gets in the way for most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Worse, the Earth itself gets in the way as the spacecraft goes over the horizon. If greater acceleration is used to keep the distances a bit lower, then the beamed power must be higher to compensate. Then they want to have much higher exhaust velocity? Doubling the Isp at the same thrust requires 4 times the power. The overall problem is a nightmare and the only thing that can really help is to beam the power _from space_ down to the spacecraft, starting when the spacecraft is at about 20 kilometers altitude. There the air is very thin and almost perfectly dry, enabling the use of very short wavelength microwaves, which are much easier to keep in a tight beam over long distances. With long-distance beaming in hand, the acceleration can be lower, which reduces the required beam power. But the obvious downside is: You have to put a specialized kind of Solar Power Satellite in space before you can launch things on the beamed energy. But you can't build it until you have the capability it is meant to deliver _already launched into space,_ assembled, tested and working. It is a Catch-22 if you try to do all or even most of the Earth-to-Orbit propulsion on the beamed energy. But if you only do a small part of the propulsion that way, you get only a marginal improvement over ordinary chemical rockets, and you still have to invest a LOT of money for a rather long period, and bootstrap your systems up to the original goal. Then, if you succeed in all that, the capability you unlock for space launch is suddenly far greater than the market requires, so your very expensive system sits idle 99% of the time. It is, unfortunately, still a total nightmare.
This is a ridiculous rebuttal. Even if you needed an SPS in LEO to bootstrap, don't you think that some old-fashioned chem-rockets could do the job? Then, you ridiculously assert a market over-supply. Don't you think, "if you build it they will come" is what would happen? A cheap lift will put all sorts of new missions in the backlog. Don't let your imagination fail to see the future.
allen everhart -- I cannot tell what you really object to, but my points are well-considered in every regard. Are yours?
Read what I wrote. One of your main objections is that such a program, if successful, would price itself out of the market. I just think that's putting the cart way in front of the horse. But believe what you want, it don't matter now that these guys have closed shop - maybe they were too successful.
allen everhart -- Don't get me wrong. I would love to see better ways of doing space launch, and I have worked on several concepts myself. However, it is much more reasonable to assume that they closed up shop because they found out that their ideas were much less than half baked. I can go into all manner of gory details of powersat design, microwave optics, minimum practical size for various configurations, etc., but first let's just do a couple of crude _sanity checks._
Look at the launch rate for a very minimal system of around half a gigawatt. Beamed to a rocket, that could propel about 1000 kg to LEO every half-hour or so. In one year, there are 17520 half-hours. That means about 17000 tonnes to LEO every year. For comparison, ISS has a mass around 450 tonnes. Where is the market for 38 times the mass of ISS, per year? I am not seeing it.
Now look at the mass for such a half-gigawatt powersat, which BTW, can't stay in LEO and still do it's job, because LEO is in shadow half the time. The beamed power is about 1/10th of a full-size powersat and those need a mass of about 36000 tonnes, in GEO, so we need at least 3600 tonnes, probably more, because some things do not scale well to smaller sizes. That is looking like about 8 times the mass of ISS, in MEO. For this special beamed energy propulsion kind of powersat, orbital altitude needs to be at least 12000 km, about 1/3 of the way to GEO, which costs about twice as much, propellant-wise, as a ride to LEO. This powersat cannot self-propel safely through the space junk cloud in LEO, because electric rockets are too slow, the spiral orbit too long, and the target area of the powersat is huge, even at 1/10th scale. So chemical rockets are needed, to loft the equivalent of 7200 tonnes to LEO. How does that compare to the total tonnage ever launched?
Is this approach still looking reasonable? Not based on present or historical values. It requires a whole new launch market to justify the cost of it, something like building a fleet of several thousand full-scale powersats to _replace with electricity_ the 3 cubic miles of oil-equivalent which Humanity consumes every year.
This is a really serious chicken-and-egg problem. Who will pony up the many billions of dollars required to build something like this propulsion powersat, when the market to utilize it does not exist and may never materialize? What is the interest on the loan, and what happens to the loan if it takes 30 years to pay it off? What if there are unexpected technical 'gotchas'? Where are the engineers and managers who will _greenlight_ this plan, when it may fail for any of a hundred known reasons and destroy their careers? How many more _unknown ways_ can it fail? Where in this risk-averse world are the investors who are making such risky investments?
Keep in mind that completing the powersat fleet market in 20 years would require launching 1 tonne per minute to LEO, far beyond the capability of the proposed sub-scale powersat. Evidently about 30 would be needed, and the time for the first one to launch all the parts for the second one looks like 150 days, if the system is not doing any paid launches to recover the initial (and still growing) investment. That 150 day _doubling time_ needs almost 5 periods to reach the level of having 30 special powersats in place: 1==>2==>4==>8==>16==>32. That is 2 years of doing nothing to pay the bills, while shelling out for 30+ sub-scale powersats.
Of course, the whole thing could be spread out in time, but then there is even more interest on the loan. "If you build it, they will come"? That is a mighty big *IF.*
Gustave Whitehead, not Wright brothers... ;)
A Saturn IV? Was that the first attempt?
This Is all good for somebody just trying to leave the Earth and get back but not so all good for somebody that is on Mars or the moon unless you get one of these stations built on those locations. This reminds me of GI Joe the animated movie where the plot device involved a machine called the broadcast energy transmitter that with basically sends free microwave based power throughout the sky. The best thing they could do to make this tech something lucrative is to create energy receiver devices to install into building so that they could is essentially become the new electric power company of the future. That,... and ensure the waves don't cause cancer since the sun is already providing free microwave energy in the air and it can absolutely kill you if you stay in it too long.
Maybe AI or Neural networks to examine or design space vehicles???
4 years later, where are the rockets?
The good news is on this rocket to Mars, it's easier to heat your lunch...
I assume the BFR burns at start 3 tons methane per second. 1 kg has 55,5 MJ. So we have at 3 tons 166,5 GJ per second. Thtt's 46,5 GW. That's about half of the maximum power grid electric power transfer of Germany.
166.5 GJ per second is 166.5 GW ( W = Js⁻¹ ) that is more than all the power grid of Germany and the UK combined.
The higher ISP would allow for an order of magnitude improvement in mass fraction, that means something like 10 times less initial mass and thrust. Doubling the ISP also doubles the power required for a given thrust, so a thermal rocket might need something like 5 times less power than a chemical rocket. That's still an astounding amount of power, so maybe payloads would have to be a little less than 150 tonnes if used as a first stage!
I don't think calling it a Rectenna will help it sell.
Ok so he's not the best speaker BUT why cant the microwave source be on the spacecraft ?
What fuel source are you using to generate the megawatts of energy required? The whole point is to have the bulk of the energy production of launch occur on the surface to reduce weight costs.
When Elon Musk starts talking about this guy, I'll listen to the rest of this.
Cool, fill the sky with orbiting megawatt microwave ovens.
12:00mins.. Have no idea what he actually want to say!! :(
Shayak Faruqui I think he's trying to say, "Oo ee oo ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang. Oo ee oo ah ah, ting tang walla walla bing bang!!!"
Rocket science, it's not brain surgery.
If an A380 @ 520 odd Tons can get off the ground with passengers, making its payload and vehicle a staggering 1,265,000 pounds.
A Saturn V is 6.5 million pounds.
So, if 4 Trent engines can lift and A380, I am sure that a lifting body that has something in the order of 20 engines on a smaller rocket as you won't need the fuel to lift the 3 stages, 1st stage takes off, flies to its limits, 2nd stage initiates and 1st stage returns to earth.
2nd Stage lifts the payload or a crew in a vehicle that returns to earth via the tried and tested method.
I am sure between the different industries that something can be designed that reduces the need for large lifting rockets.
Looking at each stage of a Saturn V, the dry weight is (according to Wikipedia) is 392,000 pounds. The wet weight is about 6,422,000 pounds which makes the weight of the fuel 6,030,000 pounds.
Shedding stage 1 for a reusable lifting vehicle would mean a saving of 5.1 million pounds of fuel and hardware, this means your lifting vehicle would be able to be big, have lots of engines to provide speed to take off. Your rocket would then be 1,322,000 pounds ... about the weight of a fully laden A380 airbus.
I expect there are errors, I rushed this through, used a resource I have not verified, but the idea of getting vehicles in to space, could IMHO be simpler and some of that would be down to rethinking how launches are done. Yes, straight up is quickest but look at the amount of fuel required to lift a large vehicle off the ground compared to that needed to get a plane off the ground.
Mark Giblin -- Unfortunately, the benefits would be far smaller than that, because the jet can only go about 500 mph, while the 1st stage of a rocket to LEO goes about 5000 mph. Ten times the velocity is 100 times the kinetic energy, so that 1% from the jet is not much of a saving. There are other benefits as well, but they only add up to about 7 percent. That is not insignificant, but it's a huge expense for very occasional use.
The point is you are "off the ground" and 500mph? What I am talking about is something at least 6 times faster than that, something of the likes of Mach3 (3704.4km/h) or better. Basically as fast as possible and then at an altitude high enough to launch the orbital payload, with a 3,500 kph head start, the next stage will launch moth that much faster.
Half the battle of getting in to space is getting off the ground.
Mark Giblin -- "Half the battle of getting in to space is getting off the ground" is an exaggeration. The energy of altitude is a very minor part of achieving orbit. That is why rockets arc over very soon after launch. They need to start accumulating the _sideways velocity of orbit._ Your statement comes closest to truth when considering the Work done vs the Energy expended by a vertical launch rocket, at launch and shortly afterwards. Engines are screaming away at full power and the rocket is barely moving. It is losing mass, which helps, but the efficiency is very low. However, they need to go slow while the air is still relatively thick. If the rocket was to go faster than Mach 1 at low altitudes, it would have to be more heavily constructed. Added vehicle mass means less payload mass. That phase of launch has room for improvement.
But an A380 going Mach 3?!? Are you nuts? Everything about that idea is wrong. Wings that are good at Mach 3 are _simply terrible_ at takeoff. Look at the Concorde, the SR-71, the B-58 'Hustler'. They all struggle to take off, despite massive thrust from their engines.
To take off from a runway with good subsonic wings, then go to Mach 3, you need different wings. Very different. A whole different airplane, in fact: A carrier on a carrier, with a rocket on top, 3 vehicles in one. Then you want to drop that rocket off, at altitude, going Mach 3?!? That is a nightmare, to say the least. I have a better suggestion.
Let the A380 'heavy cargo' variant be modified to carry a Skylon spaceplane on top and tanks of LOX inside. Let the Skylon be loaded on the ground only with the Liquid Hydrogen fuel, so that the attachment points, landing gear and wings are sized a bit smaller. Let the A380 carrier plane take off and fly to 35000 feet or so and 500 mph. While cruising at that speed, let the LOX be loaded into the Skylon, where the Skylon wings bear the weight of it. Now you are ready to release the Skylon, to fly much higher and faster while it's SABRE engines still breathe air. When the air gets too thin and fast to use in the engines, at about Mach 5 and 20 km altitude, close the inlets and start using the LOX, as the transition is already planned.
What has been saved by using the A380 carrier? A small amount of LH2, just a few hundred pounds. The major savings is to the wings, landing gear and their attachments to the airframe, perhaps 1 metric ton. So the Skylon's payload can increase from 15 tons to about 16 tons, which is 6.7%. That's it, that's all, that is the best that can be done.
It's not a worthless change, but is it worth the cost of all the modifications? Is it worth keeping this specialized A380 on standby all the time, for the occasional Skylon flight to space? At present, the answer is "No." To make it into Yes, the Skylon would need to be flying every day, at least once per day, which means that at least 2 Skylons would have to be taking turns flying up to orbit and coming right back. If the Skylon is to linger in space, then more than 2 Skylons are required. If Skylons are taking off from more than one place, then additional, specialized A380 are needed as well.
What is the launch market looking like? *Who exactly is launching 16 tons to space, every day?* The answer is "Nobody." Catch-22!
No, I am not nuts, I am looking to the future, who said thatit has to happen in my lifetime, your lifetime or my sons life time...
There will be newer materials that will provide the required weight reductions, strengths and systems to deliver as described, reusable stages and who is to say that these stages can not have their own boosters to control re-entry, you never know, planes of the future will fly in to space...
Mmmm looks like you discovered a Dew
"Saturn IV" Rocket?
Steve Fink yeah I stumbled over this, too. Assume he meant to write Saturn V (as in C-5), which did launch in 1969.
Nikolai Tesla would be proud!
When they find this plan isn't practical, they'll just wrap a blanket of slightly sub-critical uranium or plutonium or thorium around the hydrogen tank, which will make the project massively simpler. But I guess they figured out two grants generate more funding than one. Sigh.
Also making it massively heavier.
+Bill Fipp : Precisely the opposite.
Precisely the opposite? Aren't uranium, plutonium and thorium some of the heaviest elements around? Wouldn't wrapping a blanket of uranium or plutonium or thorium around the hydrogen subtract from the 10% payload to the point of making the rocket almost useless?
+Bill Fipp :: Of course those elements are dense... very dense. However, the point is, you need very little of those radioactive elements to generate enormous temperatures, which in turn generates enormous pressure in the hydrogen container they are in or next-to, which in turn generates enormous exhaust velocity of the hydrogen that is allowed to escape, which generates enormous thrust. If you think a humongous tank of liquid oxygen weighs less than 10 or 20 pounds of highly enriched uranium, plutonium (or perhaps safer thorium), you are extremely mistaken!
20lbs? That's 1 pint or half a liter of uranium, that doesn't seem like a enough to "blanket" a "humongous tank" of hydrogen, not to mention that a pint of uranium spread thin enough to cover that tank, doesn't seem like it would produce a significant amount of heat for that tank.
Why not a combination of a rail gun and chemical rocket?
Why any railgun at all when you can just use a reusable chemical rocket? If you aren't using a reusable rocket then the railgun won't reduce your launch cost by any significant amount, and if you ARE using a reusable rocket the same is true!
Solar power from space, now that is funny.
Why all the dislikes?! I think this is a great method of propulsion. Michio Kaku estimates a cost of $5/pound to LEO, as opposed to $10,000 per pound to space with regular rockets
Must start with history and facts that everyone knows ?. This means you dont have enough material to talk about your topic.
Specific Impulse is like the fuel efficiency of a rocket. It helps, but it sounds like he is talking about getting away from gravity faster, which is not strickly the same thing. We need something more like anti-grav but it may be impossible.
I’ve been here 3 minutes am about to click
Two words; space elevator.
Would Larry Niven please sue this guy into silence for stealing his ideas? He had spaceships powered by lasers or masers fired on Mercury, years (probably decades) ago, as well as launch lasers for lift-off from Earth. He could also give a better talk than this guy, in his sleep.
Thing is Larry Niven is dead and he never patented his idea.
Wikipedia says he's still alive. So, let the lawsuits begin, as the ideas while not patented were published in an extremely public way.
My guy can't give a talk 💀
As whale oil preceded electricity for lighting,.. rockets preceed magnetic and gravity drive, perhaps light drive.
Light drive... If you're interested, go and look up the planetary society and their light sail, it might not be what you meant, and you may already know about it, but anyway, it is a cool concept
The Moon rocket is labelled as a Saturn IV (4). V (5 for you non-Roman numeral readers). And I want a pickup that weighs 100 lbs. Of course with a blown and injected 8.5 liter engine (just for the fun). The "AVG MPG of a rocket is $5M for 3 launches"? SpaceX says otherwise. But this is from 4 years ago. Things have changed! Thanks Elon! After I create some Hydrogen and stick it in my microwave, I'll see how high it goes! Outside of course.
"I'd like to see, within my lifetime, us get beyond the moon, going to Mars... and beyond our solar system." How about we get back to moon first. Don't try to run before we can crawl. It's been 50 years since we left the moon. A joke.
Maby for electric car on city :) - without batery :)
This guy likes to talk thats all ...
Bosnjak Bosanac hmmm, well these are ‘TED talks’ which is kind of the point 😬
I just wish he knew how to COMMUNICATE ideas. He sounds a lot like me when I try to talk, and, in my experience, that doesn't end well. LOL
People laughed at SpaceX too. I'd bet that you were one of the haters
If I understand this right, Hydrogen is the exhaust gas, not oxidised, just Hydrogen. Being less dense than the atmospheric gases, it will rise, and largely escape to space. It will need to be replaced for your engine, presumably by electrolysis of water. If you are increaing the O2 content of the atmosphere and at the same time removing water from the planet I can see a time where the planet becomes uninhabitable. You are not adding pollutants, sure, but damage you are doing has similar repercussions.
3 minutes in and I am already bored. Did he actually prepared a speech or is he actually just rambling around in front of some power point pages? !
Eventually he outlines pointing a MASER at a hydrogen-only rocket, heating the gas for thrust. He also brought up using microwave energy to charge from the ground an in flight UAV via a rectifying antenna. I had to play it at shift >>>
How far can you beam microwave before you need repeater stations! planetary transport OK. Interplanetary needs a different fueling concept all together !
You could have an Erbium tower placed up somewhere in Alpha centauri
You build it we will come????
Professor Frink did an experiment at age 8, borrowed his Dad’s blazer, blagged his way onstage and gave a very interesting talk. Go to a tailor dude 🏌️
a rail gun drive system can generate a continuous thrust of 1 G-Force (for gravity) right passed the speed of light...
after were already in space.
It's not possible to go faster than light speed, but even if it were, a railgun wouldn't work because the speed of electricity is a lot slower than the speed of light. At some point you'd go so fast that the electric current would not be able to keep up with you and jump across the rails, so you'd stop accelerating. In fact even if you ignore that and imagine a single massive magnet to repel you, the electromagnetic force only propagates at the speed of light, so it would not be able to push you any faster than it either.
electro magnetic pulsation is the answer
Everyone can't wait to get off this planet 😂🌏