We Need a Good Power Supply

Space travel is much easier and safer than plunging into the depths of our oceans.  In space all you need is air pressure of one atmosphere since space is a vacuum, a total lack of air, or any medium that would exert pressure on you, or your craft.  So with a $20 of plastic sheets, a caulking gun and caulking, you could space proof your car!  Ok fine, but how do you now get your SPACE CAR into space?  Well lets back up a bit.  Where is space?  Sixty-two miles straight up!  If you were to get into your car and drive to a place sixty two miles away how long would it take you to get there?  Yeah about an hour, probably less.

You are able to do this because the power supply in your car, the car’s engine, is able to produce enough energy to move your vehicle at a constant speed for hours at a time.  It does this by the use of spinning wheels wrapped in a rubbery compound that comes into contact with a fixed surface.  Also called a road, highway, sidewalk…  The engine produces this power by combining gasoline and air, compressing the two and igniting the mixture.  This causes the engine to spin which causes the wheels to spin, ultimately.  So if we were able to replace the engine with a power source that didn’t need to ingest air, and had enough energy to lift say 3,000 pounds at even twenty miles per hour we could drive our cars to space.

You may be wondering if you can simply go to space at twenty miles per hour why have we been doing it at 17,000 mph for so long.  Simple.  Our power supply sucks!  Chemical rockets can provide a huge about of power over a very short period of time.  A few minutes.  So you need to get your payload in space and hold it there.  How do you do that?  You put it into orbit.  Orbit just means you are falling at the same rate that the curvature of the Earth is changing.  In other words you keep falling and because the Earth is round, you keep missing the ground.  With a good power supply you don’t have to go into orbit.  You could just “drive” off the surface and go into space.  Eventually the gravitational attraction of the Earth would dissipate to almost nothing.

So the two accidents with the space shuttle were a direct effect of going fast in space.  If they had a good power supply they could have gone much slower and safety would be near the issue it is now in space travel.  My astute readers may have already guessed that we DO have a wonderful power supply that gives lots of power for many many days, years even.  Nuclear.  A nuclear power supply is heavy because of the weight of the shielding necessary, but there’s enough power to even lift the shielding!  In fact there was a project back in the 1950’s to develop a nuclear engine.  They were very successful and if a ship had been constructed using this technology we could have placed TWO International space stations in orbit in a SINGLE launch!  We could have had a five year mission to the planets of our solar system, with a crew of some seventy people.  But people fear nuclear power, and these dreams never moved forward.

We need a better power supply.  With the level of technology that we have we could easily be in space.  Navigation, propulsion, communication, it’s all there we just need a decent power source.  It’s now 2011 and we still don’t have the magical power source (supply) that I thought we would have on January 1st, 2001!  It’s the “Mister Fusion” from “Back to the Future”.  It is the zero point energy module from “Stargate SG1”.  It’s something and we need it!

So going to space is easy, all we need is a good power supply.  A wise man once said…. “How to become a millionaire.  First get a million dollars…” – Steve Martin  That is what we are facing here, we need that million dollars and then everything changes.  Everything becomes that twenty-first century we all dreamed of as kids.