And how, exactly, are you getting 2x or more fuel into orbit? It's not a fusion rocket.
additionally, have you factored the weight and storage space lost on the fusion rocket, to make room for 2x the fuel, and then recalculated the costs for your longer burn time against maintenance costs of your rocket tube, radiation shields, and lost capital recoupment rate?
Better charge a lot more for that out of window launch!
oh kaayy..
This particular argument you just made, is similar to naysaying about commercial air travel 150ish years ago.
At the prepandemic peak, there were about 20,000 flights per day. It is currently about 8000 flights per day.
Improvements in ability to transport humans and cargo with airplanes, caused humans to transport more humans and cargo that way.
There is a desire to colonize mars, that is currently not realizable, because the costs of establishing one are too high.
One of the significant cost centers contributing to that, is cost to send the needed equipment and people there (the envirionment is not that habitable, and significant infrastructure would need to be sent there to even try), and the likely health/mortality statistic from a long duration spaceflight.
A rocket with significantly better dV, makes this more realistic.
If we can build, fuel, and deploy fusion rockets from orbit, and get the fuel and cargo up to those rockets in orbit, we very well could be seeing '20,000 flights/day' in another 150 yr.
You are making dangerously false assumptions.
1) that the fuel costs 0$ to orbit, and that there are no economic constraints on building a fusion rocket that sacrifices cargo space for the additional fuel.
2) you are assuming that the only constraint against the window requirement is crew health. (As measured as time in transit) This is not true, because fuel does not cost 0$ to orbit, and getting the most cargo to and from the target planets with the least fuel consumed, will require-- USING SUCH TRANSFERS. The insertion TRADJECTORIES will surely change with the better dV, but fusion rocket dV is not infinity. In order to make the windows 'not matter', you need 0 mass fuel, and to completely do away with the rocket equation.
3) since fuel does not cost 0$ to orbit, and is heavy, it takes time to orbit the fuel. Getting maximal economy from the very much not made of magic fusion rocket, means launching it at the optimum time, and using the non-optimum time to load it with cargo and fuel, which take time and money to get to the rocket. (Which cant fire ON THE GROUND.)
Economics, do you speak it?
This is true, but emissions are not tight laser like beams. They are exhaust cones. As long as ships are intersecting the exhaust cones of ships ahead of them (the exhaust is much faster than the trailing ships, and will intercept as distance increases. Energy exposure per cone will fall off at the inverse cube, but if you have enough ships in front of you, that wont matter. Enough stray plume photons and hard neutrons will cause daughter particle accumulation in your shielding, and secondary local decay will irradiate the ship.)
1) the 'now 2 months' is down from the 'best time of 6 months', caused by mars being literally closer to the earth.
Rockets are not magical, and this rocket is no exception.
In order to achieve the 2 month travel time, it must launch WITHIN THE LAUNCH WINDOW.
2) since the ships ARE NOT THOUSANDS OF KM APART, due to ALL LAUNCHING IN THE SAME WINDOW, (because consuming up to twice as much fuel to get there OUT of window, with hellaciously expensive uranium fuel no less, is a nonstarter) this assertion is just bullshit. The ambient dispersion is not going to be against background, it will be against the hundreds to thousands of high energy gamma ray emitting sources in front of you, in total. Pretending this wont happen is assinine. It CAN be computed.
3) no, you only need shit in front of you, while in transit for 2 months, because everyone launched at the same time, because that is when mars is physically the closest! It being able to disperse in the off season is moot.
4) get your head out of your ass, and understand prerequisites for the 2 month rated travel time. It WONT be 2months year round. Only in a short launch window. Since potentially thousands of ships will be trying to share it, the distances between them WONT be 'thousands of kilometers'.
I am going to assume you mean me, and are referring to a particularly dumb Voyager episode, involving the dumping of 'antimatter waste' into space.
That whole series is especially dumb, but that episode is even worse. Antimatter waste is gamma ray photons. If you can catch those in a tanker, you dont need to dump them. Your energy harvest ratio is 100%.
Lol
The 2 month travel time DEPENDS on alignment, sir.
The 'short' alignment is currently 5 to 6 months, which is what this rocket can make into 2 months.
The LONG alignment, is 9 to 12 months! With this rocket, it would be 4 to 6 months.
That is why all the ships will be bumper to bumper in the launch window.
Rei. Please. Use your brain.
We are not talking one ship, in this future scenario.
Not two ships.
Not five ships.
Consider more, the Los Angeles express way. This rocket engine is about the only way for there to be realistic traveltimes between earth and mars. ANY KIND of successful mars colony would have logistical delivery needs to and from earth, MUUUUUUUUUUUCH bigger than you are imagining, all crammed into a 2 to 3 day launch window.
Stop thinking like a 19th century industrialist. The emissions are a bigger long term problem than you are considering.
Again, consider more "Multiple craft on the same entry window", because orbital alignment waits for nobody-- and less "We can go whenever, and can spread them out."
The premise was "If this gets in any way regular or ordinary."
The thinking you have, is exactly the kind of thinking industrialists in the 19th century had concerning CO2 emissions.
You need to think about much later.
A conventional cycler implies traditional rocket engines, and thus tries to conserve burn as much as is possible. This is why the orbit is as circular as possible.
With a fusion torch rocket, the cycler could be on a much more elliptical orbit, with more direct paths.
(More realistically, due to the same confluences of orbital period between earth and mars that promote good transit windows, the cycler would have trips that take longer (A LOOOOT longer), and trips that take shorter (well within the time budget, it bookin' it from being driven by fusion rockets, with their high specific impulse.)
You are quite correct that the crew on board the cycler would be there on the long haul. They would probably be permanent residents.
Again, an Aldrin Cycler is the ideal use for this engine.
Because it does NOT decelerate. It rendezvous with the target body, makes a slingshot manouver, then continues BACK to Earth.
It's a cargo hauler on a continuous, noninterrupted crossing orbit.
(However, if one is wiling to envision some very unlikely collaborative space futurism magical thinking)
Construction of a single, VERY VERY LARGE spacecraft, like an Aldrin Cycler, could be inserted into a "Permanent" resonant crossing orbit between two (or more, but the math gets trickier) celestial bodies.
Once in this orbit, it no longer needs its engines, except to perform corrections.
This spacecraft is essentially a humongous space station, with hangars, docking arms, and other futuristic whizbangery, and less capable ships rendezvous with it, dock to it, and get carried out of system at a very high speed by it. It arrives in the target system, where they disembark and go about their actual business.
In that hypothetical, there is only need for a SINGLE vessel with such engines, so blasting the space behind the vessel does not carry such considerations (and carrying the requisite shielding to not give all the crew mega-cancer is realistic. It has the necessary mass to not get ripped apart on an orbit correction burn, with that kind of mass attached, and can have engines big enough to boost/move that kind of mass.)
BUUUUUUT-- do you really think we would be *ABLE* to cooperate, internationally, long enough to actually BUILD and DEPLOY an Aldrin Cycler?
I don't really think so.
Indeed. The problem, is that if there are multiple spacecraft in the transit "lane" (Defined by the mathematically valid region of space in which gravitational captures are permissible for a spacecraft to perform an interplanetary insertion) then you will have "Innocent bystanders" behind your exhaust. Getting blasted by very high energy particles.
For a single spacecraft, it is just fine.
For any kind of sustained space presence? Not so much.
"You shouldn't make my toaster angry." -- Household security explained in "Johnny Quest"
