News: antimatter rockets

News for those of you with spacefaring concultures: there's
a method to use antimatter as "fuel" for spaceships, using
a hybrid annihilation-fission-fusion engine. See
http://www.highway2space.com/newsarchives/antimatter.html.

In short, there's a possibility to use small quantities of
antimatter (antiprotons at least) to compress U238, which
would produce fission; neutrons would compress a deuterium-
tritium sphere even further and induce fusion. This is called
Antimatter-Catalyzed Micro-Fission/Fusion.

Scientists estimate needs: 1 to 10 micrograms of a-m for a
1-year manned trip to Jupiter with half the mass of the ISS;
10 to 100 micrograms to send a 100 kg payload on a 50-year
trip to the Oort Cloud.

The problem: a *nanogram* of a-m costs $6.41 million. But that
could be reduced an awful lot if we were willing to spend some
billions on upgrades and new a-m generators.


--Pablo Flores
  http://draseleq.conlang.org/