[extropy-chat] (Link) Antihydrogen Propulsion

[scerir]

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0410511

'Controlled Antihydrogen Propulsion 
for NASA's Future in Very Deep Space'

by Michael Martin Nieto, 
Michael H. Holzscheiter, Slava G. Turyshev.

12 pages, 3 figures, to be published in the Prceedings of the
2004 NASA/JPL Workshop on Physics for Planetary Exploration

'To world-wide notice, in 2002 the ATHENA collaboration 
at CERN (in Geneva, Switzerland) announced the creation 
of order 100,000 low energy antihydrogen atoms. Thus, 
the concept of using condensed antihydrogen as a low-weight,
powerful fuel (i.e., it produces a thousand times more 
energy per unit weight of fuel than fission/fusion) for 
very deep space missions (the Oort cloud and beyond) had 
reached the realm of conceivability. We briefly discuss 
the history of antimatter research and focus on the 
technologies that must be developed to allow a future 
use of controlled, condensed antihydrogen for propulsion 
purposes. We emphasize that a dedicated antiproton source 
(the main barrier to copious antihydrogen production) must
be built in the US, perhaps as a joint NASA/DOE/NIH project. 
This is because the only practical sources in the world are 
at CERN and the proposed facility at GSI in Germany. 
We outline the scope and magnitude of such a dedicated 
national facility and identify critical project milestones. 
We estimate that, starting with the present level of knowledge 
and multi-agency support, the goal of using antihydrogen 
for propulsion purposes may be accomplished in ~50 years.'

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[Next step should be the controlled 'unmatter'
propulsion, or the controlled teleported
antimatter propulsion, of course :-)]