NEW!! Photon Thermal Drive!! Mars in 45 days! Jupiter in one year!

A new, innovative way to travel between the planets swiftly, and even a way to lift off without chemical rockets!!
Elon Musk feels that Raptor is the best way to get to Mars. NASA may be shooting for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion.
But, is there an even better way??

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Check out the technology!!

Liftoff with lasers!!

[DrKnowitallKnows]

Dude what happened to the previous version? You get a copyright infringement?? Anyway glad you got around it. This is a much needed video!

[dennispeterson]

It is safe to send a nuclear reactor/rocket into orbit, as long as you wait until you're in orbit before you start the reactor. The dangerous radioactives are the waste products of fission. Before you start the reactor, it's barely radioactive.

[ShaunRF]

I remember watching programs on Discovery and TLC in the 90's that featured Leik Myrabo, a scientist who was working on a laser launch system.

[tomcraver]

For aerobraking, why not heat propellant using the radiative heat from the plasma shockwave (keeping the ship cool as a side effect) and exhaust that propellant in the direction you're falling for thrust - probably hybridized with a chemical (or nuclear thermal) engine to add the final heat energy to control the size and temperature of the plasma cone around the ship. Need ship cooling vs the radiative heating anyhow, though I'm not sure if the added complication of using that collected heat for a bit more thrust is worth considering.

[kennyfordham]

The thing is though, a laser powerful enough to propel a spacecraft can also be used as a weapon; It can easily destroy enemy satellites. If it's mounted on a plane or boat, it would devastate terrestrial targets.

[craigschumacher]

Putting nuclear reactors into orbit is not particularly dangerous provided you don't switch it on until you get there. Prior to first use, there will be very little radioactivity involved.

[pabcu]

Awesome, imagine if we could get more funding into this (also did something happened that caused you to reupload?)

[olveaustlid]

Every time I visit your channel, I learn something new. Great content, Angry!

[joefunk]

I was first, until damn copyright hit.

Thanks Jordan for giving us something to take our minds off of the Ukraine tragedy for a bit.

[FirstPassOfficial]

NSWR could match that, assuming 80% U-235 to water ratio.

[solanumtinkr]

Nuclear Torch drives are a thing as well. Torch as in emitting things like ultra violet light out of the back as the method of propulsion.

[cyberfeedforward]

For reasons Kenny pointed out, no government would tolerate the deployment of these lasers. They pose too much of a threat to national security and space infrastructure.

[swirlingbrain]

How come we don't use laugh energy instead of scream energy?

[CrimsonTemplar]

IIRC, we had a Space track panel on this technology at DragonCon a few years back. Richard Garriott’s wife was one of the panelists.

[earlofdoncaster]

Why use hydrogen as reaction mass when nitrogen involves fewer problems? Or Argon.

[hdufort]

A light craft to reach orbit would be as good as a space elevator, but it looks much more feasible. I would use a light craft to put cargo in orbit. Then assemble mission in orbit.

[sledxdomi]

The only real concern i would have with this concept would be the ammount of time it would take to comunicate back to where the lazer is comming from if an emergency shut down is required.

For example if were beaming the lazer from 3 light minutes away, then thats 3 minutes that the lazer can be cutting the craft open before it is shut down

I would feel safer with nuclear thermal

[platinumfamily]

Maybe they should concentrate on the small things first, like musk getting a starship to takeoff and land. Then move on to the magical laser rockets.

[ChaJ]

I have seen this talked about before. What I have come up with is:
1. I am leery of ground based high powered laser systems. I am concerned with the atmosphere involved, too much can go wrong at these power levels. I am thinking you will need something like Starship to launch your laser array into orbit. We already have the tech to make big lasers. Look at the National Ignition Facility where they use massively powerful lasers focused onto one tiny spot to create fusion energy. It can be done; it is just big and heavy. And this propulsion system would need variable focus to always fill the collector evenly so as to not burn a hole in it when close by while also not being too diffuse at a distance. Focus should be easy enough.

2. I am thinking in space, this makes a lot more sense. There is a certain confinement of the frequency range in space because you don't want visible light as that can get to be blinding from reflections, you don't want to go higher into ionizing radiation and you don't want to go too far towards radio as you hit the diffraction limit and can't focus at long distances. So essentially this needs to be in the infrared to deep infrared range. Even microwave range you need the emitter source to be close as say going out to GEO you would need a collector several km across due to the diffraction limit. But this is also one of the reasons laser based communications is so important is laser light can be focused a lot better than radio waves, which is hugely important when talking about transmitting solar system and beyond distances. When Earth is a little spec in the distance and your receiver is an even smaller spec, when the cone of the beam is bigger than the Earth, then very little hits your even smaller receiver, but if the cone is much more confined, then a lot more hits your receiver.

3. This gets to another point, the collector on the spacecraft needs to be a certain size and most likely this will be a fairly big size. This means there is a minimum size to the ship in order for this sort of system to be effective. What you would be using this for most likely are large crewed ships with spinning artificial gravity and large cargo and propellant haulers. At this maybe you use it for a booster that returns to LEO. A big problem that needs to be solved efficiently is getting up to Earth's escape velocity from LEO. With chemical you use most of the starting mass of your spacecraft to do this, so that cost is pretty high. If this laser system can even achieve 2, 000s of ISP with enough thrust to make good use of the Oberth Effect, you have a rather propellant efficient means of reaching Earth's escape velocity. If the booster returns to Earth for a future mission, that can get to be a rather cost effective solution over time. I mean the laser array goes up into orbit once, the booster goes up into space once. Then relatively small amounts of propellant are used up to possibly boost up to several ships on every orbital alignment as there is a window where some ships go slightly faster than other ships in that window to do the transit to Mars. When you talk about the scale Elon Musk talks about for going to Mars, this starts to make a lot of sense. This is not saying you go to Mars really fast nor on a bunch of Starships as Starship is way too small for such a laser system as the receiver would be way too wide and bulky for Starship, but instead you would have several large, bulky crewed ships with plenty of shielding, artificial gravity, and overall resources for the ride out to Mars.

4. I am somewhat skeptical of the 3, 000s of ISP. Maybe with the right frequency of light with the right focus inside the heating chamber this can be done. Otherwise the ISP drops down so things don't melt. NTP has to tone things down some to keep the reactor rods from melting. With this you are trying to heat the propellant as much as possible directly with the laser light if you are trying to go above and beyond what NTP can do, so that would be more of what you can contain without melting your containment vessel.

5. When someone thinks about chemical, the key takeaway is the molar mass of the exhaust. Heavy molecules are good for thrust, bad for ISP as the heat accelerates them less, but mass generates more force. This makes more sense when you consider the starting mass of your spacecraft includes the mass of the propellant. So have a lot of oxygen and carbon and it just doesn't exit the engine all that fast for a given amount of heating and then you throw out all of that mass before picking up all that much speed. When you just have light hydrogen, the same amount of heating causes that light hydrogen to exit much faster, but seeing it is lighter, it generates less thrust. So then you needs lots of voluminous hydrogen, which needs to be super cold to liquefy, which means big, well insulated tanks (and even at this hydrogen atoms are so small they tend to wiggle through the spaces between larger atoms and escape containment), in order to have the reaction mass to accelerate your spacecraft. The thing is you care about starting mass as you have to haul all of this up to space to use it, a bunch of light stuff is good if you can shoot it out of the back of your spacecraft rapidly.

[frankdindl]

I met Liek Myrabo many years ago. Obviously a very bright guy with an interesting idea. That said, I prefer open cycle fusion engines that would allow a spacecraft to accelerate/decelerate at 1 g for its entire trip. That gets you to the moon in a few hours and to Mars in days, not weeks or months.