Antimatter

>>8585044
i dont know, maybe because it is hard to make and store?????????????????????????????????????

That and I am going to also blame money; the achilles of the sciences.

>>8585044
>We haven't even made one gram of the stuff yet
>It explodes violently when it touches literally anything
>Why can't we use it as spacecraft fuel?

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There is this. I think fusion is a more appropriate response.

>>8585044
Why would we be able to use antimatter to fuel spacecrafts now?

>>8585044
How easy it is to store is a major criteria for spacecraft fuels. That's why kerosene is so widely used.

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>>8585044 (Checked)
>Rocket crashes
>Small country gets annihilated

>>8585044
Here are reasons:

1. We can only produce maybe a few atoms of antimatter so far at a time. It costs a fortune and is extremely inefficient energy-wise
2. We can't really store it long-term. You need to cool it down massively and store it in some kind of super vacuum in an extreme magnetic field gradient.
3. It's not a good propellant. When annihilated, it produces mainly photons. They may carry a lot of energy, but not really a lot of momentum. If you have an energy E = mc^2 produced via annihilation, then a momentum of E/(2c) = mc/2 is produced. That is by no means a lot. And that is the best case scenario. If your space ship weighs 10 tonnes, after a burst of 1g of anti-matter (which is a lot) it will only be 100 m/s faster (and probably kill the crew)
4. It is hard to extract energy otherwise from it. Those high energy photons basically penetrate everything. Shielding them requires a lot of unnecessary mass.

Short: Antimatter is shitty energy source. It sounds good at first, but turns out to be really impractical.

>>8585479
Great post, very comprehensive

I knew the first two points but your third point was rather informative. I knew that antimatter annihilation was inefficient but that detail about a lack of momentum from the resulting photons.. an eye opener for sure