Quotes About Propulsion

The amount of coal required to propel a single 10,000-ton ship across the ocean was far less than the amount required to drive two 5,000-ton ships across the same distance.

Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star.

The deep space transport uses a new type of propulsion system to send astronauts through space, called solar electric propulsion. The huge solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. This is used to strip away the electrons from a gas (like xenon), creating ions. An electric field then shoots these charged ions out one end of the engine, creating thrust. Unlike chemical engines, which can only fire for a few minutes, ion engines can slowly accelerate for months or even years.

Most of the energy of a chemical rocket goes into lifting its own weight into space, but a nanoship passively receives its energy from external ground-based lasers, so there is no wasted fuel—100 percent of it goes into propelling the ship. And since nanoships do not have to generate their own energy, they have no moving parts. This significantly reduces the chances of mechanical breakdowns. They also have no explosive chemicals and would not blow up on the launchpad or in space.

In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.

You, The audience, furnish it's propulsion. With a wondrous leap of imagination, you make it into a real spaceship that can take us into the far reaches of the galaxy and sometimes even to the depths of the human soul.

There are no miracles here, just momentum.

known as Aztlan was to obtain gold and to enrich cultures and races that preceded the Mayas, [and] the forefathers of Aztecs were the people of Aztlan and that the great floods drove them from their original, ancestral homeland." The aliens needed gold—and later silver—exclusively as part of their craft's propulsion system.

We do need different types of propulsion to get to Mars. I wrote one of the first Ph.D. theses on that in the 1960s.

If there is a small rocket on top of a big one, and if the big one is jettisoned and the small one is ignited, then their speeds are added.

Markus came back on the air. "Jiro and Dinah, you must be ready to fire the main propulsion at apogee—

I studied space dynamics, in all its phases, Gaean economics, the mathematical basis of trans-dimensional propulsion. I am familiar with Handbook to the Planets and Gaean Cosmography. In short, I am not just another dilettante! I am anxious to apply my knowledge to useful purposes.

We're very focused on building the hyperloop. And the hyperloop is exactly something we've described as an actual tube with levitation propulsion and a vacuum that essentially vents around sky inside the tube flying at 200,000 feet. That, to us, is the hyperloop, and we're the only company building that.

Every work, no matter how short or antilinear, needs momentum;

that power setting produced an acceleration of over

It would be sad if the expertise built up during the 40 years of the U.S. and Russian manned programmes were allowed to dissipate. But abandoning the shuttle, and committing to new launch vehicles and propulsion systems, is actually a prerequisite for a vibrant manned programme.

systems—power, propulsion, communication, life support—were

Really exotic methods of propulsion . . . will have to be devised to get there. How it will be done, I do not know. Whether it will be done, I am not quite certain. But I would bet it can be done.