How best to use wormholes for spaceflight?

The goal is to get from Earth to the Outer Solar System, preferably the Kuiper Belt, as quickly as practical, with a crew of about 12, and a not-set-in-stone dry mass around 30 tons.

The characters have access to something resembling a wormhole, whose other end is in a different universe. Both mouths can be moved without much energy expenditure. For setting-specific reasons, this requires constant attention from a specific crewmember, such that wormhole throughput effectively stops when they do anything else. It is not practical to just build a habitat on the other side and let the rest of the crew wait there, to minimize payload, but using the other side of the wormhole for storage of food, supplies, etc is possible.

I see two ways this could be used for spaceflight: either use the wormhole for fuel-storage to bypass the Rocket Equation, or point the wormhole at a star, and let the star provide exhaust. For character-related reasons, the simpler the end product, the better.

My preference is the Stellar Exhaust solution. However, if they use something like a Coronal Mass Ejection (exhaust velocity potentially approaching 3000km/s), the exhaust would be absurdly hot, include intense radiation, and possibly some other electromagnetic effects I'm less clear on. I don't expect this would be safe on or near Earth, even assuming there's a way to prevent it from frying the ship. The characters have access to handwavium that can mitigate some of this, given constant effort, but I don't know that it'd be enough to make stellar exhaust viable.

Given the fuel storage option, I'm expecting they'd need a high-quality rocket engine, whereas stellar exhaust seems like it could get away with a simple nozzle, if not less.

It's possible I've overlooked something that changes the answer dramatically from either of these.

Given the above, what would be the best way to accomplish the goal?

posted over 4 years ago

CAE Jones‭

6 reputation 6 0 1 0