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A reactionless drive is a hypothetical device producing motion without the exhaust of a propellant.A propellantless drive is not necessarily reactionless when it constitutes an open system interacting with external fields; but a reactionless drive is a particular case of a propellantless drive that is a closed system, presumably in contradiction with the law of conservation of momentum.
All designs for electromagnetic propulsion operate on the principle of reaction mass. A hypothetical drive which did not expel propellant in order to produce a reaction force, providing thrust while being a closed system with no external interaction, would be a reactionless drive, violating the conservation of momentum and Newton's third law. [17]
For example, a 1-tonne spaceship traveling at 1/10 of the speed of light carries a kinetic energy of 4.5 × 10 17 joules, equal to 5 kg according to the mass–energy equivalence. This means that for accelerating to such speed, no matter how this is achieved, the spaceship must have converted at least 5 kg of mass/energy into momentum ...
Even without an exhaust, the photon pressure of the energy emitted by a thermal source can produce thrust, although an extremely tiny amount. A famous example of spacecraft thrust due to photon pressure was the Pioneer anomaly, in which photons from the onboard radioisotope source caused a tiny but measurable acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft.
An antimatter rocket is a proposed class of rockets that use antimatter as their power source. There are several designs that attempt to accomplish this goal. The advantage to this class of rocket is that a large fraction of the rest mass of a matter/antimatter mixture may be converted to energy, allowing antimatter rockets to have a far higher energy density and specific impulse than any ...
Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945) [1] was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which was successfully launched on March 16, 1926. [2]
The Helical engine is a proposed spacecraft propulsion drive that, like other reactionless drives, would violate the laws of physics. [1] [2] [3]The concept was proposed by David M. Burns, formerly a NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, in a non-peer-reviewed report published on a NASA server in 2019 describing it as "A new concept for in-space propulsion is proposed ...
Magnetic sail animation. A magnetic sail is a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion where an onboard magnetic field source interacts with a plasma wind (e.g., the solar wind) to form an artificial magnetosphere (similar to Earth's magnetosphere) that acts as a sail, transferring force from the wind to the spacecraft requiring little to no propellant as detailed for each proposed magnetic ...