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A few years after the Collier's Mars plan, a sort of scenic
route to Mars plan was put forward by Ernst Stuhlinger, who came up
with an alternative to chemical rockets. His electric propulsion
system was an early version of the ion drive now being tried out on the
latest generation of deep space probes.
While today's ion drive
is used to push tiny robot probes, Stuhlinger's ships weighed in at
250 tons and were manned. The huge parasols on top of the ships
are heat radiators for the nuclear-powered engines that sprayed ionised cesium to
provide thrust. This is pretty fuel efficient as space
propulsion goes. You only needed 18.5 tons to get to Mars, but
it is slooooow. At only 1/1000th of a G, you would spend two
months of the year-long voyage just getting out of Earth orbit in a
series of ever-widening spirals. Hope you like the view,
because you're going to be seeing it for a long time! |
