Mission to mars with warp drive

Suppose we discover an effect of superconducting ceramics:
they generate a gravitational field.

Lets say that we can make a spaceship out of this ceramic, enabling us to make a trip to mars in the same amount of time it took a launch to the moon.

What would you say is the time line of the mission… from discovery of the gravity effect to touchdown?
Years, decades?

The discovery of a practical means of antigravity would be at least as revolutionary an invention as atomic bombs were. A lot would depend on whether the antigravity effect was merely a laboratory curiosity, or whether it could be scaled up to a practical device in a short period.

I think that before we saw space missions, the government’s first priority would be applying the new technology to our armed forces. It would make the current generation of aircraft completely obsolete, as well as create systems that could change all our battle plans. Flying tanks? Global range VTOL airlift capability? Fixed position high altitude platforms? Who knows what else?

It would be like going from dugout canoes to frigates in a single decade. I presume that as a spinoff there would be extensive planetary exploration as well.

For a rough idea, you can look at our development of rocket-powered space vehicles. We first launched a man on a rocket in the fifties. By the end of the sixties, we had men on the Moon.

Of course, a lot of it would depend on the specifics of this antigravity technology. Suppose, for instance, that it takes a few gigawatts to support each gram of material. This wouldn’t be a big problem for CERN or Brookehaven levitating a dust grain, but there’d be no way we could make a power supply for a ship at that rate.

This post reminded me of a series of stories by Harry Turtledove set in a universe where practical antigravity and FTL propulsion are simple technologies that most civilizations discover and exploit around the same time they come up with gunpowder, though sometimes cultures as primitive as bronze age stumble across it. Through sheer dumb luck humanity overlooked it until we are ‘invaded’ by aliens with muzzle-loading rifles in the early 21st century, kick their butts, and proceed to conquer the universe - the technical advancement of most cultures stalls once they start exploring and exploiting other planets, and the most advanced alien races are technologically equivelant to Europe in the Middle Ages (aside from their big iron spacecraft).

Sorry for the hijack…but assuming this technology is fairly simple and inexpensive, it wouldn’t take long before someone used it to start planting flags around the solar system, though it might be considerably longer before we did more than that - maybe a couple of years after the first self-contained levitating device that can carry a human, maybe even sooner - if you had a vehicle that could accelerate at a constant 1 G, just slap some shielding on it, make it airtight, throw in a few oxygen tanks and masks, and you can be at Mars later that day.

That would be pretty funny.
Alien - “Take me to Earth Capital human or I will blast you with my death-ball launching device!”

That’s an understatement. Developing the atomic bomb was an engineering project; the science had been known for a decade or so. A discovery of antigravity would require a fundamental rethinking of the basic laws of physics.

So what you’re really looking at is (1) experimental observation of the phenomenon, (2) revision of the laws of physics such that the phenomenon is put on a theoretical footing, (3) application of the theory to a practical device.

Step (1) could happen tomorrow, or never. Step (2) would take 10-100 years, based on the history of science. Step (3) would probably take about 10 or 20 years, but there’s a possibility it would never happen either. Just because we understand a physical phenomenon doesn’t mean there is any everyday practical use of it (e.g. relativity).

AFIK there were no humans riding ballistic missles until Gagarin’s April '61 flight. Rocket powered aircraft had been in use and testing since the early forties at least with serious rocket research decades before that. Rockets have been around and the physics of ballistic flight have been understood for hundreds of years.

How would an antigravitational field help to propel a spacecraft through space? I wouldn’t think it would be very useful once the ship was far away from a large mass to push against. (I don’t mean to nit pick, I’m just curious and I’m not all that familiar with sci-fi stuff.)

All the Earth based levitation applications would be pretty cool though.

Not antigravity that would propel it away from gravity, Sleepy, but a superconductor that could generate a gravetic field. Superconductors need only a certain amount of power to start, and then they continue to conduct.

If this made a gravity field, we could shape it to move the craft along, and it would require no initial power input.

I think Lumpy’s analogy with atomic fission is one of the best that can be drawn. He hit the nail on the head with is comment about the initial practicality of the technology.

But he didn’t use it to try and answer the OM’s question.

Let’s make a few reasonable assumptions based on the information you provided:

[li] Transit time of 3 days. This suggests an enormous amount of energy to accelerate and decelerate a craft. Does this energy have to be supplied to the superconducting engine or does the engine “tap” into some resource accessible along the way? If it’s the former, then we’re decades away from a practical, portable, safe energy source of that scale - a ship-based fusion reactor. If it’s the latter, then we’re left with the next tradeoff:[/li]
[li] Ceramic Superconductor. Manufacturing techniques for these devices are not very well developed, especially if you need to make windings out of them. If you just need a small, simple shape like a core or ring, then these can be made using current tooling. But if you need a coil of hundreds or thousands of windings of superconducting “wire” then we’re at least 10 years away from a reliable method of making these using the ceramic superconductors currently being studied in labs. And that’s assuming you have the money to throw at the problem…[/li]
[li] Crew accomodation. You want to accelerate and decelerate hard enough to get a crew to Mars in 3 days? Good luck - I’m no orbital mechanic, but I stringly suspect that just the accelerations involved in this fast of a trip will be the show stopper. If you’re lucky, a smart engineer may find a way to use the gravitic effect to locally balance out the acceleration on the crew, permitting them to survive the trip (though this will need even more power, so add at least 10 more years to the fusion reactor timeline). If not, you’re either going to have to send an automated probe, accept a compromise of a 10 to 30 day trip, or wait 50-100 years at a minimum for physics to discover some sort of inertialess field.[/li]
So using the above assumptions, and considering current levels of political motivation and funding, the best-case scenario is probably 20-30 years. If that doesn’t sound like good news to you consider this: add 5 years and we’ll be going to Jupiter and Saturn. Five more and the first humans will have visited Pluto and the outer edges of the Solar System, and the economic development of the inner system will have begun. Once that door is opened, colonization of the entire system will follow rapidly.

Did anyone see that article in one of the tech magazines, describing how a scientist was working on- and apparently close to a breakthrough- an actual antigravity device?

I honestly can’t recall the magazine, and the article was not detailed, but the point was, it didn’t so much “create” an “antigravity” field, instead it was supposed to “block” the Earth’s gravity.

Like a mask making a shadow in a spotlight, anything in that “gravity shadow” was not affected by gravity- well, I assume Earth’s gravity anyway. In other words, as the article put it, anything placed in the “shadow”, an area that got bigger and bigger as one goes higher, and no matter the weight, would simply hang there, as it does in space.

Now, the article said they’re years away from the breakthrough, but they were confident it could be done. I don’t know about power requirements, but I got the impression it was not something that required a whole Three Mile Island to power it, and in any case, once powered, the mass it could render weightless was nearly infinite- It wasn’t having to “lift” anything, it was merely blocking that which gave it weight.

I thought the article was very interesting, but it didn’t give many details.

However, if it works, that would still render a huge benefit to spacetravel. Heck, render an entire Shuttle launchpad area shadowed from gravity, and you could use a big spring and two roman candles to launch the whole shuttle into space, at which point you could THEN light the boosters to inject the entire craft into a trans-lunar or trans-martian orbit.

I mean, wasn’t something like three-quarters of the Apollo Saturn 5’s fuel used simply to get everything out of Earth’s gravity well? As another poster mentioned a little while back, if one could have the whole S5, complete, in orbit, it has enough fuel to make for a VERY fast trans-lunar trip.

3 days is PLENTY of time to get to Mars if you have a constant-acceleration drive.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, if you accelerated at a constant 4 G’s halfway, then decelerated at 4 g’s for the other half, you’d be there in 34 hours. Assuming you took off for Mars 34 hours before direct opposition with Earth, which means you’d take a straight-line course from here to there in the shortest possible distance. 3 G’s puts you close to the 3 day mark.

Accelerating at a constant 1G would take 16 times as long. Still, 22 days for a nice earth gravity trip isn’t bad.

I think your calculations are off - 22 days is far too long to get to Mars at 1 G constant acceleration. I haven’t done the math to figure out how long it would take to get to Mars, but I have the figures for the first 24 hours of a 1 G trip.

You would be travelling at 3,048,192 km/hr. You would have travelled 36,578,304 km that first day.

After 48 hours you would be travelling at over 6 million kilometers an hour and would have travelled 146,313,216 km. - over 90 million miles.

When Mars is at it’s closest to Earth, you could make it there in under 2 days at 1 G. At it’s furthest, less than 5 days.

When we develop constant boost engines, the solar system is going to get a LOT smaller.

That’s a really big “if”, pal.

I have a design for one capable with modern technology capable of several Gs for weeks on end, but running it requires the sacrifice of sentient beings, and I doubt I would be able to kill enough to get very far without being arrested.

Yes, but the leap from putting a man in orbit to putting a man on the moon is just one step in the evolution of rocketry. Compare this timeline.

3rd Century BC - Earliest recorded mention of gunpowder comes from China.

1045 A.D. - The use of gunpowder and rockets formed an integral aspect of Chinese military tactics

1926 - Goddard launches the first liquid fuel rocket.

1942 - First ballistic rocket successfully launched. Led to the German V-2 rockets.

1957 - Sputnik launched

1961 - First man in space.

1969 - First man on the moon.

1981 - First Space Shuttle mission.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/rocket-history.txt
We are a long way off from creating an anti-gravity superconducting space ship. The little superconducting wafers manufactured in a laboratory are the rocketry equivalent of a bamboo tube stuffed with gunpowder. We don’t really even have practical uses for them yet. My guess is 50 years.

Ok, I’ll take the bait.

What is this “design” of yours? The Cthulu Engine? Do Tell!

I still stand by my figure of a decade or so, once the discovery is made, assuming that it scales well. We can already make airtight space capsules, and if we have a big antigravity device (big enough to lift a whole spacecraft), then we just stick it on, and we’re ready to go.

It should be noted, by the way, that there have been no experiments which demonstrate anything resembling antigravity or gravity nullification, and there is currently no theoretical grounds for any such effect. The experiment to which Doc Nickel is referring is on worse scientific grounds than cold fusion, and about equivalent to the “hydrino process”. Superconductor levitation in a magnetic field, meanwhile, is a very real effect, but it has nothing to do with antigravity: It’s just using another force to counter gravity, not unlike the way folks normally use a force from their legs to counteract gravity when they stand.

Doc Nickel said:

About 97% of the weight of the Saturn V was in the first three stage engines and fuel. I estimate about 80% of that weight was fuel. See http://www.apollosaturn.com/asnr/tablecon1.htm for weights.