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Comments on High-Energy Exhaust Shielding for Far-Future Drive

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High-Energy Exhaust Shielding for Far-Future Drive

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Imagine a far-future spacecraft drive that accelerates its reaction mass to a small fraction the speed of light (say, 1,000 km/s). Say the mass flow rate to the drive were 1kg/s, and say the reaction mass were hydrogen. what effect would the resulting exhaust have on humans? On other spacecraft? If fired within an atmosphere comparable to Earth's at sea level, how would these effects change? What sort of shielding would be needed to protect a spacecraft or EVA suit and the people inside from damage or injury? How far would you have to be from the nozzle to safely remain inside the exhaust jet in a vacuum? In an atmosphere comparable to Earth's at sea level? How would this change with higher exhaust velocity, say 30Mm/s?

Such a jet would put out 500GW of power, and assuming the jet diverges, the intensity drops with the inverse square of the distance. This question was discussed here, but the provided answer deals primarily with the force exerted on spacecraft in the jet and is more focused on less powerful engines with a much lower exhaust velocity (40-100km/s). This question deals more with considerations that must be made with exhaust velocities at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

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2 comment threads

Your numbers don't add up. (2 comments)
Relativistic speed (2 comments)
Your numbers don't add up.
Olin Lathrop‭ wrote about 2 years ago · edited about 2 years ago

Kinetic energy is mV2/2. Each second your engine is putting out (1 kg)(1 Mm/s)2/2 Joules, or 500 GJ, which is a power of 500 GW, not 1 TW. Also your exhaust speed is 1 Mm/s. The speed of light is about 300 Mm/s, so you're at 1/300 the speed of light. There aren't going to be a lot of relativistic effects.

Josh Hyatt‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Thanks for catching my mistake, I've corrected this. See this comment for my explanation on the use of the word relativistic.