Antimatter "Я" Us - An Orbital Antimatter Factory
Space travel between planets is a time-consuming radiation filled experience. To reduce your radiation exposure you have three main strategies:
- increase your distance from the source,
- increase your shielding,
- reduce your time of exposure.
In space travel cosmic radiation and solar wind are two sources of radiation. Cosmic rays permeate the solar system more or less evenly and there is no escaping that source. Increasing your distance from the Sun is not much of an option as the solar wind only reduces slowly as you get farther away from the Sun. If you are on a return trip back to Earth from the outer solar system then it will only increase.
Increasing your shielding on a ship also has limits because more mass means more fuel is needed to lift into orbit or to accelerate up to speed and this would be expensive.
The best option therefore is to go very fast and reduce your time of exposure.
The options are chemical rockets or ion thrusters. Chemical rockets are massive and limited because of that. Ion thrusters can produce high delta-v but they do so very slowly. Since both of these options are limited, humanity may one day have to turn to antimatter to power their engines.
As I showed in One Gram Killed Hiroshima a small amount of mass can be converted into a large amount of energy. In the case of the Hiroshima bomb about 1 gram of matter was converted to the energy to produce that explosion.
Using the equation E = mc2 you can calculate that 1 gram of matter has the energy equivalent of 9.0 x 1013 joules of energy. To do this you would use 0.5 gram of anti-matter to annihilate 0.5 grams of matter for a total 1 g of mass converted into energy.
The International Space Station has a mass over just over 400 metric tons. If you accelerate this up to 30 km/s to get to Mars quickly then that ship would have an energy E = 1/2 mv2 = 18 x 1013 joules of energy which is twice the energy contained in 1 gram of matter.
So it would only take 1 gram of anti-matter reacting with 1 gram of matter to get a fairly hefty space ship up to 30 km/s. The same amount of anti-matter would be needed to slow it down at the end of the trip.
If you want more speed then just use more anti-matter.
An Anti-Matter Factory
Currently anti-matter is only produced in very small quantities at places like the CERN Antimatter Factory and the cost to produce it is estimated to currently be at least $25 billion per gram. So a lot more work obviously needs to be done to get the costs down.
Let's imagine that a cheaper and more efficient antimatter production method is eventually found. Where would this factory be built?
In orbit of course. Anti-matter is dangerous stuff and if it ever escapes its magnetic bottle then bad things will happen. You do not want this factory to be on Earth if an antimatter explosion occurs.
In orbit, if an antimatter explosion occurs it is well away from any large inhabited place. In a very high Earth orbit there is also power from sunlight 100% of the time. Large solar panel arrays could be used to power up any accelerators to keep that antimatter production flowing.
If a magnetic bottle only stored a milligram of antimatter (to reduce the effects of a loss of containment) then you would need a few thousand of these bottles to get your ship up to speed and to brake it at the end of the trip. Not a showstopper.
You would also want to store these bottles well away from the crew cabin and from each other to avoid a cascading explosion effect if one lost containment and exploded. Stringing these bottles out on a long power cable behind the ship might therefore be a viable design option.
Closing Words
Antimatter is currently hard to produce and it is very expensive. If the technology to make this process more efficient and cheaper ever comes along then an antimatter factory in space seems to be the way to go.
Ships would arrive at the station, transfer their bitcoin into the factory's wallet, get their delivery of 2 or 3 thousand magnetic bottles of antimatter and then go on their merry way back to the asteroid belt.
Thank you for reading my post.
Post Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station
https://physicsworld.com/a/antimatter-factory-opens-at-cern/
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2012/05/21/antimatter-the-production-problem/
https://home.cern/about/updates/2018/04/live-inside-cerns-antimatter-factory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter
That is insane. and I am all for investing huge amount of money into scientific researches, but that is simply too much.
That sounds perfect, but I wonder why bitcoin? when we have others like steem that are faster and with no fees :P
How about Mars Coin? or Space Coin maybe?
as long as they have no fees haha
Great post @procrastilearner
I've heard in a TV documentation that it will take at least 10.000 years to produce 1 gram of antimatter, so there is enough time that the bitcoin can envolve and transactions will go instantly. :-)
Hah! That's optmistic.
Remember that positron are produced in many many places all around the world, in a cheap way (i.e. PET scans). Positrons also belong to antimatter. For many reasons, many omit this fact ;)
Thx for the info.
Electrons and positrons are something like 1/1800th the mass of a proton or antiproton.
So I wonder if it would be an inefficient method just because of that?
It depends which type of antimatter particle you consider. For positrons, they are very easy to produce as they naturally arise in many processes :)
Hi @procrastilearner!
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