The US Navy combat laser program is getting stalled with $55 million per year for prototypes but no combat deployment. The US Navy does not want to start spending billions to deploy small numbers of lasers that will probably live up to expectations of effectiveness. When the US Navy says a weapon system is too …
Google has spun out a new laser communication company called Aalyria. It will manage a hyper-fast, ultra-secure, and highly complicated communications networks that span land, sea, air, near space, and deep space. Aalyria will “radically” enhance satellite communications, airplane Wi-Fi, and other forms of cellular connectivity. It is also stated that the spinout has already …
There are three main types of nuclear fusion and PB11 (hydrogen-boron) is the most desired. PB11 nuclear fusion would have almost no neutron radiation but it takes 1 billion degree temperatures instead of 100 million for deuterium tritium or about 500 million for deuteriurm-deuterium. The PALS laser facility in Prague has reported a major advance …
The Limitless Space Institute is reviewing the work of Interstellar grant recipients. It is feasible but very difficult to make a laser pushed sail reach 20% of the speed of light. The general parameters are for an array of lasers with 100 Gigawatts of power to push a 1 gram solar sail that has 4 …
Philip Lubin and his team are continuing to make progress toward laser pushed sails. This is a way to achieve significant fractions of the speed of light for interstellar missions and a way to beam power for movement within the solar system at high speeds. One of the key aspects to this work is phase …
Breakthrough Starship wants to use a 100 Gigawatt laser array to push an ultralight 4 meter X 4 meter nanocrystal solar sail. StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program. The light sail is envisioned to be no larger than 4 …
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) have made an optical mirror using only a few hundred identical atoms. They used a new metamaterial made of a single structured layer. few hundred identical atoms. Interfering laser beams hold two layers of atoms in arrays. This has come from an emerging new field …
Extreme metamaterial solar sails as proposed here have the potential to shift the paradigm of space exploration enabling numerous low cost and high-speed missions to be launched anytime and anywhere. Such sails could gain accelerations over 60AU/yr when coupled to low mass spacecraft and dive to extreme proximity to the sun (just 2-5 solar radii). …
Power is everything is a famous quote from the movie Apollo 13. A similar statement is made by Marc Millis about interstellar travel. Marc is a thought leader in interstellar travel. Marc says that for whatever speed increase we want then we will need to square the energy increase. If we want to go ten …
Femtosecond Projection Two-photon Lithography (FP-TPL) printing technology increases the printing speed by 1,000 – 10,000 times, and reduces the cost by 98%. It controls the laser spectrum via temporal focusing, the laser 3D printing process is performed in a parallel layer-by-layer fashion instead of point-by-point writing. This is a technological breakthrough that leads nanoscale 3D …
This is an update of the system under development by John Brophy and his team and it will use a kilometer-scale, multi-hundred-megawatt phased-array laser to beam power to a vehicle that converts it to electrical power for a multi-megawatt electric propulsion system that produces a specific impulse of 58,000 s. This will enable velocities of …