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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

Using Spacex BFR to rapidly and affordably build interplanetary photonic railway by the 2030s

• nextbigfuture.com by brian wang

They are working working to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocrafts.

A large scale network of several 70 Gigawatt lasers on Earth, Earth Orbits, the moon Mars and asteroids is not as distant as one might think because of several converging systems and technological shortcuts.

A laser power of 70GW (without photon recycling) can send a 100 kg craft can be propelled to 1AU in approximately 3 days achieving a speed of 0.4% the speed of light, and a 10,000 kg craft in approximately 30 days.

The full scale DE-STAR 4 (50-70 GW) will propel a wafer scale spacecraft with a 1 meter laser sail to about 26% the speed of light in about 10 minutes (20 kgo accel), reach Mars (1 AU) in 30 minutes, pass Voyager I in less than 3 days, pass 1,000 AU in 12 days and reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years. The same directed energy driver (DE-STAR 4) can also propel a 100 kg payload to about 2% c and a 10,000 kg payload to more than 1,000 km/s.


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