Reference: Star Wars Museum of Science Boston

"Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination" Museum of Science, Boston

Concept Spacecraft

Interstellar Ramjet Rockets need fuel to propel themselves. Even the most efficient ones would need tremendous amounts of fuel to travel interstellar distances. A ramjet avoids this by collecting its fuel as it moves through space. It uses a gigantic funnel to collect interstellar hydrogen.

Interstellar space is mostly empty but not entirely. Hydrogen atoms are scattered throughout space. If you could scoop up enough and feed them to a fusion reactor, you could theoretically travel forever.

Laser-Assisted Ramjet Ramjets sound promising but they have serious drawbacks. The ramscoop need to be gigantic--hundreds of miles in diameter--if it's going to gather enough hydrogen. They also need a power source for the magnetic field that captures the hydrogen.

Among some of the refinements proposed for the basic ramjet design includes using a laser in Earth-orbit that would provide energy to the ship to heat the hydrogen flowing to the reactor.

Matter/Anti-Matter Rocket The chemical rockets we use today to get into space will never get us to the stars. They are too inefficient. Nuclear rockets offer the potential to go much faster with much less fuel. But even nuclear reactions convert less than 1 per cent of their mass into energy.

The most powerful rocket we can conceivably make would use hydrogen and combine it with its opposite--antihydrogen. A matter/anti-matter reaction would convert almost all of its mass into energy. If all this energy could be tapped, a ship could reach almost two thirds the speed of light..

Daedalus In the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society challenged its members to design a spaceship using existing and emerging technologies. The result was Daedalus, a two-stage rocket designed to send an unmanned probe on a fifty year trip to Barnard's Star, a distance of 6 light years.

Daedalus would use tiny fusion reactions to propel itself. A chemical rocket typically uses 800 pounds of fuel for every pound of payload it carries. A nuclear rocket like Daedalus would use only 100 pounds of fuel per pound of payload.

Interstellar Ramjet
Rockets need fuel to propel themselves. Even the most efficient ones would need tremendous amounts of fuel to travel interstellar distances. A ramjet avoids this by collecting its fuel as it moves through space. It uses a gigantic funnel to collect interstellar hydrogen.

Laser-Assisted Ramjet
Ramjets sound promising but they have serious drawbacks. The ramscoop need to be gigantic--hundreds of miles in diameter--if it's going to gather enough hydrogen. They also need a power source for the magnetic field that captures the hydrogen.

Matter/Anti-Matter Rocket
The chemical rockets we use today to get into space will never get us to the stars. They are too inefficient. Nuclear rockets offer the potential to go much faster with much less fuel. But even nuclear reactions convert less than 1 per cent of their mass into energy.

Daedalus
In the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society challenged its members to design a spaceship using existing and emerging technologies. The result was Daedalus, a two-stage rocket designed to send an unmanned probe on a fifty year trip to Barnard's Star, a distance of 6 light years.