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engines until it switches over to pure matter-antimatter annihilation. It will use this mode to accelerate the remainder of the way to .92 c. Pellegrino estimates that the ship would require 100 tons of matter and antimatter to reach 0.1-0.2c, with an undetermined excess of matter to ensure the antimatter is efficiently utilized. To reach a speed of .92 c and decelerate afterward, Valkyrie would require a mass ratio of 22 (or 2200 tons of fuel for a 100-ton spacecraft).
54:, with the crew quarters, fuel tanks, radiation shielding, and other vital components being pulled between front and aft engines on long tethers. This greatly reduces the mass of the ship, because it no longer requires heavy structural members and radiation shielding. This is a considerable advantage because in a rocket every extra kilogram of payload (dry mass) will require a corresponding extra amount of propellant or fuel.
78:. Waste heat is dumped into liquid droplets that are cast out in front of the ship. As the ship accelerates the droplets (now cool) effectively fall back into the ship, so the system is self-recycling. During deceleration, the ship will be protected by ultra-thin umbrella shields, augmented by a dust shield, possibly made by grinding up pieces of the discarded first stage.
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further protect it. At the trailing end of the ship would be a second engine, which the ship would use to decelerate. The forward engine and the tank holding its fuel supply might be jettisoned before deceleration, to reduce fuel consumption. The tether system requires that the elements of the ship must be moved "up" or "down" the tethers depending on flight direction.
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kilogram of antimatter would yield 9×10 J if annihilated with an equal amount of matter, this quickly adds up to enormous energy requirements for its production. To produce the 50 tons of antimatter
Valkyrie would require 1.8×10 J. This is the same amount of energy that the entire human race currently uses in about forty years.
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elements and engines. As long term space flight at interstellar velocities causes erosion due to collision with particles, gas, dust and micrometeorites the tethers are literally lifelines. Changing course or turning the ship requires re-positioning or aligning every ship element and presumably consumes more fuel in doing so.
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antimatter-beam drive) lies in its requirement of tons of antimatter fuel. Antimatter cannot be produced at an efficiency of more than 50% (that is to say, to produce one gram of antimatter requires twice as much energy as you would get from annihilating that gram with a gram of matter). Since half a
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By using tethers there is no rigidity between ship elements and engines. Without active acceleration or thrust to pull and straighten the tethers the slightest imbalance, excess force, or the moving of the ship elements into different flight configurations pose a danger for collisions between ship
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The
Valkyrie would have a crew module trailing 10 kilometers behind the engine. A small 20-cm-thick tungsten shield would hang 100 meters behind the engine, to help protect the trailing crew module from its harmful radiation. The fuel tank might be placed between the crew module and the engine, to
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As the liquid droplet radiators (LDR) are deployed on the other side of propulsion and the main body, the droplets and the collectors are exposed to the other half of the heat energy from the gamma radiation from the antimatter annihilation. If the total area of the collectors are larger than the
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to initiate an extremely energetic fusion reaction. A magnetic coil captures the exhaust products of this reaction, expelling them with an exhaust velocity of 12-20% the speed of light (35,000-60,000 km/s). As the spacecraft approaches 20% the speed of light, more antimatter is fed into the
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would require much less antimatter and, with an exhaust velocity of 30–60,000 km·s, still compares quite favorably with competing engines such as the inertial confinement pulse drive used by
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The
Valkyrie's high performance is attributable to its innovative design. Instead of a solid spacecraft with a rocket at the back, Valkyrie is built more like a
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At such high speeds, incident debris would be a major hazard. While accelerating, Valkyrie uses a device that combines the functions of a particle shield and a
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radiation shield the LDR would serve to cool itself rather than the shield for the ship's main components.
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114:. The Valkyrie's lightweight construction could also be applied to a wide variety of space vehicles.
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There and Back Again: A Layman’s Guide to Ultra-Reliability for
Interstellar Missions
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320:"Spaceship Technology in Avatar is the Valkyrie Antimatter Rocket Design"
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A superficially-similar interstellar spacecraft is featured in the movie
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Initially, the
Valkyrie's engine would work by using small quantities of
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with a combined area of millions of square kilometers or many
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211:"The Valkyrie Spacecraft - The Next Giant Leap?"
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261:NASA Technical Memorandum 108537, July, 1997
295:The Cosmic Compendium: Interstellar Travel
16:Theoretical antimatter powered spacecraft
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322:. nextbigfuture.com. January 26, 2010.
292:Anderson, Rupert W. (28 March 2015).
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233:"The Equivalence of Mass and Energy"
237:Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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182:Atomic Rockets: Slower Than Light
38:and Jim Powell (a physicist at
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178:"Valkyrie Antimatter Starship"
40:Brookhaven National Laboratory
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339:Edited Guide Entry (BBC.com)
282:Henry Garrett, 30 July 2012
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21:Valkyrie (disambiguation)
366:Hypothetical spacecraft
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239:. 12 September 2001.
19:For other uses, see
371:Interstellar travel
348:2010-05-29 at the
278:2014-05-08 at the
257:2015-09-23 at the
215:Edited Guide Entry
146:Project Prometheus
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192:9 March
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133:Avatar
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