An Interstellar Antimatter Engine Is on Kickstarter

It's not a warp drive, but it could get us to the nearest star in two decades. If it works.

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Hbar Technologies, LLC

I promise you, this isn't something from Coast-to-Coast AM: A former FermiLab researcher thinks he can make an antimatter engine, one that could accelerate a spaceship to 40 percent of the speed of light. And he intends to start a Kickstarter to help him build the proof of concept.

For the paltry price of $200,000, Gerald Jackson and Steven Howe (formerly of Fermilab and Los Alamos, respectively) say they can create a thrust measurement device. That device will be used to measure the thrust between a conventional thrust engine and a lightsail that would be bombarded with antimatter to push a spacecraft. They already have some pieces of their elaborate puzzle dreamed up under the banner of Hbar Technologies, LLC, but funding dried up a few years ago. 

Their grand plan is to send a lightweight probe to the Alpha Centauri system, which would use a lightsail system built partly out of depleted uranium. With 17 grams of antimatter on board, the craft would slowly accelerate toward the speed of light, topping out at about 40 percent of that mark. The probe would reach its destination in 16 to18 years.

That would be one expensive flyby. The mission would come at an estimated price tag of $100 billion per gram of antimatter according to Popular Science, or $1.7 trillion just for fuel costs. They don't, as yet, even have the antimatter needed for the thrust detector they want to fund. Let's also mention here that scientists have never produced more than a gram of antimatter in any U.S. lab. You'd also need certain other necessities, like something to store all that antimatter that wouldn't make it annihilate the other matter around it, a technology which might be hard to develop. They anticipate the cost of the entire system would be $100 million (minus the very expensive fuel.)

Of course, they could cut down some of the costs with one of Jackson's NIAC proposals from a decade ago, harvesting anti-matter in space. It's still sounding a bit farfetched, but with the right funding, Jackson and Howe claim they could have something in the next 10 to 30 years. The Kickstarter isn't up yet, but once it is ... prepare for the future, or something like it. 

Source: Forbes via Popular Science

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