![The Daedalus spacecraft measured against London’s St. Paul cathedral]()
scifi.bg
The Daedalus spacecraft measured against London’s St. Paul cathedral
At one of their science parties, a bunch of scientist from the
British Interplanetary Society started playing about with the question of how they could achieve interstellar travel with the technology at the time. Talks became serious and in the end the scientists had
project Daedalus – 160 meter colossus powered by the nuclear fusion of Helium-3 and deuterium fuel, capable of achieving a speed of 21 777 777,8 meters per second. This is a whole 7% of the speed of light, enough to reach from Sofia to Sydney in 0.7 seconds.
Despite the fact that the necessary technology is with us since the 90’s, one serious drawback sticks out in the project – the cost/usefulness ratio. Do you have any idea what it’d be like to find 50 000 tons of deuterium and Helium-3? Well, not easy. And the expense of transporting them into space? We’re talking trillions of dollars (unless we first build the moon base and/or the HARP gun described above – then we’ll still be talking trillions but not that many).
The other problem is that in space it’s harder to stop than it is to move. Daedalus had no breaks intended so the plan was for the craft to take as many pictures as it could and send them as fast as possible back to Earth. Then it would continue it’s space voyage until it either hit a rock or some innocent alien. In other words, the British Interplanetary Society wanted an unimaginable amount of money to build a humongous photo camera. I’m running to the bank, so I can transfer my deposit in their name.
