Firing Off Charged Nanoparticles Might Allow Spaceships to Move at Near-Light Speed

sweet light speed

Great concept, but where are they going to manufacture the nanotubes they need for sustained flight of this vehicle?

Oh, it's very late (for me) and I'm quite groggy-headed. But isn't this BS?

As someone above pointed out, you gotta have a bunch o' nanotubes - not only to speed up but to slow down on the other end of the trip - and where do those come from? The more mass you take with you the more tubes you gotta fling to accelerate.

And isn't it true that no matter what matter you're flinging out the back end of a spacecraft, the amount of total energy needed to fling it approaches infinity as you push closer toward light speed?

I'm not sure any of that makes sense. If I'm wrong on the above, I'll swear that I went to bed hours ago and I'm sleep-typing.

Very similar to NASA's Ion particle drive.

From the article....

The only real downside is that nanoFETs are not imagined to provide the kind of high acceleration needed to break Earth's gravity and escape orbit. But once in space, a ship equipped with nanoFET would have an extremely thin and lightweight engine with a commensurately compact fuel source. The nanoFET would be able achieve nearly constant acceleration. Do that for long enough, and speeds of 90 percent of light speed might become possible. Just think, if the Americans in Armageddon had a nanoFET powered space ship available to get out and intercept that asteroid, that whole Affleck-Armageddon fiasco could have been avoided. And wouldn't we all want that

The movie was only a little over 2 hours long, if the shuttles took the years needed to slowly accelerate and decelerate the planet would be long dead by the time they got to the asteroid (plus the audience would be asleep). Additionally it wouldn't have saved the movie from Affleck unless they replaced him with a better actor.