R
rogers_buck
Guest
The thing about rocket fuel is that once you burn it, it is gone. What if the fuel itself were reuseable?<br /><br />Here's an example of what I mean. Suppose you had a mole of 10gram rubberish balls that each contained a micro ion propulsion drive. The little rubber balls might each contain a small radioactive power source. The balls would be capable of interracting with each other via a network and could also accept commands from outside. <br /><br />To make a long story short, the balls would be commanded to bounce off the back of a payload that requires acceleration. Each time a ball strikes the payload it would impart its momentum to the payload thereby accelerating it. The collision would have to be just below the energy level that would destroy the balls. So some would be moving much slower than others to strike the target at that threshold energy as it accelerates. After the balls are boinged out, they would then regroup and start the process of accelerating all over again.<br /><br />For this to be a viable technology, the balls would have to be able to raise their energy levels without fuel by taking advantage of things you cn do with tiny rubber balls that you wouldn't want to do with space craft. For example, skimming over the lunar surface for a tidally intense gravitational boost.<br /><br />What would make this work is the sheer number of these tiny little boosteroids. They could hang out in space for years storing a modest amount of energy that would equate to megajoules when integrated over their sheer numbers. <br /><br />Come to think of it, these little ball formations would be excellent at cleaning up near-earth space. They could venture at a highly eccentric orbit into the path of a satellite and steal some of its momentum sending the satellite into the earth's atmosphere and themselves into a slightly higher orbit.