Post by anonymous on Nov 29, 2018 14:43:04 GMT
One of the main problems with interstellar travel is that moving at any significant fraction of the speed of light makes even the smallest mote of dust a powerful bullet that could shred your vessel almost immediately. One possible solution I saw was putting the interstellar equivalent of an ablative heat shield at the front of the vessel: a large disk of metal that would take damage on behalf of the spacecraft and be jettisoned at the end of the journey. Far from elegant, but it got me thinking. What if, instead of a physical shield, a magnetic one was employed instead? This wouldn't work so well for electrically neutral matter, though, and so I was wondering about the feasibility of ionizing the debris in order to make it react to our magnetic shield. Either a high-power laser to turn the debris into plasma, or perhaps a cathode ray spraying it with free electrons (supplied by something like an electrostatic-based reaction control system). Would something like this ever work? More importantly, could it ever be used?
