NASA, as I am sure you all know, is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The president has announced plans to get men back into the space exploration business around 2015 by sending them back to the moon and to Mars by around 2020. Will this really happen? While no one can predict the future, it we can afford it, we could return to the moon. Mars is another story. The longer the flight the more exposure to cosmic rays. Even if we had a ship ready today that could reach Mars and return, it would not be prudent for anyone to man it. Creating a ship with enough shielding to prevent radiation from getting to the crew would make the ship too heavy, so the only other way to avoid radiation from the sun would be to have a special shielded room built into the ship and when solar flares that might threaten the crew were forming, everyone would have to get into that room. I don't really think that this is too practical.

Saturn Rocket

So what is required here? We would require the invention of a new light weight material that would be radiation proof. We could also use a new means of propulsion that would get us to Mars a lot faster. This would also lessen our exposure. The problem is that we don't have these things yet and we may not have either by 2020. But maybe I am wrong and in some secret lab somewhere we do have this material or this engine and the president knows it. If this is the case then why wait twenty years? But there is another alternative. Maybe there is research going on that most of us don't know about.

There is a concept that is being looked into right now. It involves a sail. No it is not that old solar sail concept, that would hardly be fast enough. It is an antimatter sail. This sail would allow a ship to reach the speed of 260,000 mph in four months, our normal probes travel at about 38,000 mph. At this speed, if it wasn't for the buildup time, we could reach the moon in under two hours. This is quite a lot faster than your average rocket. The way the sail would work is antimatter atoms would be shot out of the ship and hit the sail. The sail will be coated with a thin layer of U-235 which will cause a small amount of nuclear fission pushing the ship faster. The concept is not without its problems. Right now, no one has figured out how to contain the antimatter, or for that matter, how to create enough antimatter to make it useful as fuel. Antimatter will get destroyed with it comes into contact with matter so you can't store it in the normal way. As for production, so far the most that the biggest lab in the world can manufacture in a year is hundreds of times less than a gram. Maybe they could use a little help from 'Scotty' (Reference to Commander Scott on the spaceship Enterprise from Startrek, as if you didn't know)

Antimatter Being Ejected From A Black Hole

When Apollo was cancelled NASA was working on a different type of propulsion, a nuclear engine. Here is how it works. Something like hydrogen is pumped into a reactor core and it gets heated up to about 2500 degrees Celsius and is blown out of an exhaust. This type of engine has the potential to propel a ship about 3.5 times faster than a chemical rocket. As in everything else in life there are problems with this type of engine. The reactor is heavy and shielding is required. Both of these things reduce the power because of the added weight. This would require a ship to have reactor shielding and shielding from cosmic rays for a Mars trip. In 1980 work was begun again. here and a few years before in the USSR. Since any gas could be used to power the thrust, it has been suggested that a gas which occurs naturally on Mars be used. This way the ship can refuel on the planet. At one time a propulsion unit was proposed that exploded small nuclear bombs behind a vehicle to propel it. Supposedly the project was dropped but who knows if it ever became a black ops project.

The ion engine is already in use in some probes. Deep Space 1 uses it. This is a system that builds speed over time. It is almost like shining a light in space and relying on it to propel you forward. It is basically an electric system that uses Xenon gas that is hit by electrons causing a positive charge that is known as an ion. The thrust of this engine on Earth would be almost nothing but in space it is sufficient. A new type of Ion engine is being developed that operates on microwaves. The new engine would be able to reach Jupiter on its own with using any sling shot maneuvers. Because it doesn't need to make this slingshot maneuver, a launch is possible at any time. Usually these launches require specific launch windows that are relatively rare. To power the ion engine and allow it to produce electricity a small nuclear reactor is being proposed. All of this is part of Project Prometheus which was formerly called the Nuclear Systems Initiative.

Ion Engine

Lets hope that one of these project bears fruit and doesn't contaminate space or other planets.