If you could build a spaceship that runs on solar power, couldn’t you accelerate indefinitely at a modest 1G?
by admin on Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 | 10 Comments
And eventually reach near light speed?
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1g acceleration is anything but modest, and there is no way you could do it using solar power. It would take a year, in any case, to get near the speed of light at 1g acceleration.
Im not sure where you are getting the 1G figure, as gravity and Solar Power have nothing to do with each other. In addition, the soloar power would depend entirely on where u are located from the Sun. Closer to the sun, more power, further away, less power, so there isn’t any way to have a constant acceleration if you are going solely on solar power.
The 1G comes from Newton’s law of Gravity, and depends on the Mass of the Earth.
No. It would take something much more powerful than solar power to reach light speed. You’d have to use something like antimatter. And it may not even be possible to go at the speed of light. The laws of physics won’t allow it. We can speed sub atmoic particles up to 99.99% the speed of light…in a particle accelerator.
but wouldn’t you be travelling away from your source of power. You could however design a gravity powered spacecraft. You simply release the spacecraft in a gravity rich environment and it accelerates towards its destination. I have already built and tested a prototype to travel from the top of a stepladder to the floor.
Go outside…..
Hold up a solar cell to the starlight.
Does it do anything?……..
To propel any vehicle in space you need something to push against. Rockets push against their own exhaust. Ion powered space craft use electric power to push an ionized gas out the back of the vehicle and the vehicle recoils off from that. But that still requires a supply of gas to be ionized and when it runs out the electric power from the solar panels is useless for propulsion. And of course if you did get going really fast you would quickly get so far from the Sun that the solar panels would produce little or no power.
where do you plan to accelerate to?… far from the sun?
To do this trick you would have to accelerate in an orbit around the sun .
sure, as long as you don’t end up too far from your power source. But you’ll have a hard time figuring out how to make a ship move using solar power.
If you could make a ship with a Light Sail, you could catch waves of light and ride them at light speed. But you have to figure out how to do that, first.
No, you would run out of solar power as you move away from the power source (aka the Sun).
1g acceleration for any decent amount of time is inhumanly difficult. The best rockets we have now can keep it up for a few minutes at best. And you also need reaction mass to propel an object unless you use a photon drive, which would give you 1 newton of thrust for 300MW of power.