Project Valkyrie

The Valkyrie is a theoretical spacecraft designed by Charles Pellegrino and Jim Powell (a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory). The Valkyrie is theoretically able to accelerate to 92% the speed of light and decelerate afterward, carrying a small human crew to another star system.

The Valkyrie's high performance is attributable to its innovative design. Instead of a solid spacecraft with a rocket at the back, Valkyrie is built more like a cable car train, with the crew quarters, fuel tanks, radiation shielding, and other vital components being pulled between front and aft engines on long tethers. This greatly reduces the mass of the ship, because it no longer requires heavy structural members and radiation shielding. This is a considerable advantage because in a rocket every extra kilogram of payload (dry mass) will require a corresponding extra amount of propellant or fuel.

The Valkyrie would have a crew module trailing 10 kilometers behind the engine. A small 20-cm-thick tungsten shield would hang 100 meters behind the engine, to help protect the trailing crew module from its harmful radiation. The fuel tank might be placed between the crew module and the engine, to further protect it. At the trailing end of the ship would be a second engine, which the ship would use to decelerate. The forward engine and the tank holding its fuel supply might be jettisoned before deceleration, to reduce fuel consumption. The tether system requires that the elements of the ship must be moved "up" or "down" the tethers depending on flight direction.

Initially the Valkyrie's engine would work by using small quantities of antimatter to initiate an extremely energetic fusion reaction. A magnetic coil captures the exhaust products of this reaction and it is expelled with an exhaust velocity of 12-20% the speed of light (35,975-58,900 km/s). As the spacecraft approaches 20% the speed of light more antimatter is fed into the engines until it switches over to pure matter-antimatter annihilation. It will use this mode to accelerate the remainder of the way to .92 c. Pellegrino estimates that the ship would require 100 tons of matter and antimatter to reach 0.1-0.2c, with an undetermined excess of matter to ensure the antimatter is efficiently utilized. To reach a speed of .92 c and decelerate afterward Valkyrie would require a mass ratio of 22 (or 2200 tons of fuel for a 100-ton spacecraft).

At such high speeds incident debris would be a major hazard. While accelerating, Valkyrie uses a device that combines the functions of a particle shield and a liquid droplet radiator. Waste heat is dumped into liquid droplets that are cast out in front of the ship. As the ship accelerates the droplets (now cool) effectively fall back into the ship, so the system is self-recycling. During deceleration the ship will be protected by ultra-thin umbrella shields, augmented by a dust shield, possibly made by grinding up pieces of the discarded first stage.

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Wikipedia