Recent content by Parsec

Maybe what we need is a private corporation chartered by the government, similar to the Federal Reserve, only focused on space. The banks certainly have plenty of capital to invest in job creating infrastructure since they haven't been making new loans with their bailout money.

Different Plasmatron. I've discovered something similar to Chernetski's Self Generating Discharge. Notice that the upper plasma torus is a few thousand times larger than the initial 5/16" spark no longer visible inside the base. And that's at atmospheric pressure, with 275 Joules...

At first look my Plasmatron will be high-thrust, but I don't expect the ISP to be over 2,000. However, I've also done a lot of work with Inertial Propulsion and this is the main reason for my optimism - no practical limit to the Dv. However, I don't see any reason to ditch the usual...

Thanks for the welcome, everyone. Discounting any imminent development of a basket ball fusion reactor, it would be expedient to use solar energy to power the idealized thruster. The challenge here is to build up a desired level of velocity while still close enough to the sun for the solar...

I'm a space enthusiast and optimist and I'm happy to join your discussion group. I'm a propulsion specialist and I envision a new paradigm in which our ships will have an indefinite specific impulse. Then we can imitate Star Trek and fly above a constant latitude. And, with solar power, we...