How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years

  • Antimatter engines could be humanity's ticket to interstellar travel. 
  • When antimatter particles come in contact with regular matter, it produces loads of energy. 
  • That energy, if we learn to harness it, could get us to Pluto in just a few weeks.

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Interstellar travel is only something humanity has achieved in science fiction — like Star Trek's USS Enterprise, which used antimatter engines to travel across star systems.

But antimatter isn't just a sci-fi trope. Antimatter really exists.

Elon Musk has called antimatter power " the ticket for interstellar journeys, " and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to harness it.

Antimatter is made up of particles almost exactly like regular matter but with opposite electric charge. That means when antimatter contacts regular matter, they both annihilate and can produce enormous amounts of energy.

"Annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy," Weed, cofounder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.

Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It's that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.

Space travel at record speed

The benefit of all that energy is that it can be used to either accelerate or decelerate spacecraft at break-neck speeds.

For example, let's take a trip to our nearest star system, Proxima , about 4.2 light years away.

An antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft at 1g (9.8 meters per second squared) getting us to Proxima in just five years, Weed said in 2016 . That's 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 — one of the fastest spacecraft in history — to travel about half the distance, according to NASA .

Even within our own solar system, an antimatter-powered spacecraft could reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks compared to the 9.5 years it took NASA's New Horizons probe to arrive, Weed said.

Why we don't have antimatter engines

The reason we don't have antimatter engines, despite their tremendous capabilities, comes down to cost, not tech.

Gerald Jackson, an accelerator physicist who worked on antimatter projects at Fermilab, told Forbes in 2016 that with enough funding, we could have an antimatter spacecraft prototype within a decade.

The basic technology is there. Physicists armed with the world's most powerful particle accelerators have made antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms.

The issue is that this type of antimatter is incredibly expensive to make. It's considered the most expensive substance on Earth. Jackson gave us an idea of just how much an antimatter machine would cost to build and maintain.

Jackson is the founder, president, and CEO of Hbar Technologies, which is working on a concept for an antimatter space sail to decelerate spacecraft traveling 1% to 10% the speed of light — a useful design for entering into orbit around a distant star, planet, or moon that you want to study.

Jackson said he's designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter per year.

"For a 10-kilogram scientific package traveling at 2% of the speed of light, 35 grams of antimatter is needed to decelerate the spacecraft down and inject it into orbit around Proxima Centauri," Jackson told BI.

He said it would take $8 billion to build a solar power plant for the enormous energy needs of antimatter production and cost $670 million per year to operate.

The idea is just that, for now. "There is currently no serious funding for advanced space propulsion concepts," Jackson said.

However, there are other ways to produce antimatter. That's where Weed focused his work.

Weed's concept involves positrons, the antimatter version of an electron.

A different kind of antimatter engine

Positrons "are several thousand times lighter than antiprotons and don't pack quite as much punch when annihilating," Weed said.

The advantage, however, is that they occur naturally and don't need a giant accelerator and billions of dollars to make.

Weed's antimatter propulsion system is designed to use krypton-79 — a form of the element krypton that naturally emits positrons .

The engine system would first gather high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them toward a layer of regular matter, producing annihilation energy. That energy would then trigger a powerful fusion reaction to generate thrust for the spacecraft.

While positrons may be less expensive to obtain than more powerful forms of antimatter, they are difficult to harness because they are highly energetic and need to be slowed down, or "moderated." So building a prototype to test in space is still beyond reach, cost-wise, Weed said.

Such is the case for all antimatter propulsion designs . Over the decades, scientists have proposed dozens of concepts, none of which have come to fruition.

For example, in 1953, Austrian physicist Eugen Sänger proposed a "photon rocket" that would run on positron annihilation energy. And since the '80s, there's been talk of thermal antimatter engines, which would use antimatter to heat liquid, gas, or plasma to provide thrust.

"It's not sci-fi, but we aren't going to see it flying until there is a significant 'mission-pull,'" Weed said about his engine concept.

Can it work?

To build Weed's concept at the scale of a starship, "the devil's in the engineering details," Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist and host of "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, told BI.

"We're talking about a device that harnesses truly enormous amounts of energy, requiring exquisite balance and control," Sutter said.

In general, that enormous energy is another obstacle holding us back from revolutionizing space travel. Because during testing, "if something goes wrong, these are big explosions," Steve Howe, a physicist who worked on antimatter concepts with NASA in the '90s, told BI.

"So we need an ability to test high energy density systems somewhere that don't threaten the biosphere, but still allow us to develop them," said Howe, who thinks the moon would make a good testing base. "And if something goes wrong, you melted a piece of the moon," and not Earth, he added.

Antimatter tends to bring out the imagination in everyone who works on them. "But, we need crazy but plausible ideas to make it further into space, so it's worth looking into," Sutter said.

Weed echoes the sentiment, saying "until there is a compelling reason to get to the Kuiper Belt , the Solar Gravitational Lens, or Alpha Centauri really quickly — or perhaps we are trying to return large asteroids for mining — progress will continue to be slow in this area."

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Mars with a partial eclipse

"Engineering, stand by for warp drive." With that command, the "Star Trek" crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise prepared to hurl the spaceship through the cosmos at superluminal speeds.

Warp drive is one of those science-fiction technologies, like teleportation and time travel , that have some scientific basis. We just haven't achieved it yet. However, scientists are working on developing an interstellar spacecraft engine that is similar to the antimatter engine of the Enterprise.

antimatter space travel

­No engine is likely to generate superluminal speeds; the laws of physics prevent us from doing that, but we will be able to go many times faster than our current propulsion methods allow. A matter-antimatter engine will take us far beyond our solar system and let us reach nearby stars in a fraction of the time it would take a spacecraft propelled by a liquid-hydrogen engine , like the one used in space shuttles .

It's like the difference between driving an Indy race car and a 1971 Ford Pinto: In the Pinto, you'll eventually get to the finish line, but it will take 10 times longer than in the Indy car.

Let's peer a few decades into the future of space travel to look at an antimatter spacecraft and find out what antimatter actually is and how we might use it for an advanced propulsion system.

What is Antimatter?

Antimatter particles at work, the role of particle detectors, so why no matter-antimatter reaction engine, matter-antimatter engine.

antimatter space travel

This isn't a trick question. Antimatter is exactly what you might think it is — the opposite of normal matter, of which the majority of our universe is made. At one point, scientists considered the presence of antimatter in our universe as only theoretical.

British physicist Paul Dirac helped change our understanding of antimatter.

In 1928, he revised Einstein's famous equation E = mc² . Dirac said that Einstein didn't consider that the "m" in the equation — mass — could have negative energy as well as positive energy. Dirac's equation (E = + or - mc²) allowed for the existence of anti-particles in our universe. Scientists have since proven that several anti-particles exist.

These anti-particles are, literally, mirror images of normal matter. Each anti-particle has the same mass as its corresponding particle, but the electrical charges are reversed. Here are some antimatter discoveries of the 20th century:

  • Positrons : Electrons with a positive instead of a negative charge. Discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932, positrons were the first evidence that antimatter existed.
  • Anti-protons : Protons that have a negative instead of the usual positive charge. In 1955, researchers at the Berkeley Bevatron produced an antiproton.
  • Anti-atoms : Pairing together positrons and antiprotons, scientists at CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research, created the first anti-atom. Nine anti-hydrogen atoms were created, each lasting only 40 nanoseconds. As of 1998, CERN researchers were pushing the production of anti-hydrogen atoms to 2,000 per hour.

When antimatter comes into contact with normal matter, these equal but opposite particles collide to produce an explosion emitting pure radiation, which travels out of the point of the explosion at the speed of light. Both particles that created the explosion are completely annihilated, leaving behind other subatomic particles.

The explosion that occurs when matter and antimatter meet transfers the entire mass of both objects into energy. Scientists believe that this energy is more powerful than any that can be generated by other propulsion methods.

Antimatter in the Universe

Gamma rays and cosmic rays are high-energy particles and radiation that originate from various sources in the universe, such as supernovae, black holes and even the Big Bang itself. Scientists theorize that antimatter should be as abundant as ordinary matter because of the Big Bang, but it's scarcely observed in our universe.

A particle detector is an essential tool in the field of particle physics. They enable scientists to identify and study subatomic particles, including those made of antimatter, as they interact with matter. By capturing and analyzing particle interactions, detectors help scientists understand fundamental particle properties and investigate the universe's origins.

The problem with developing antimatter propulsion is that there is a lack of antimatter existing in the universe. If there were equal amounts of matter and antimatter, we would likely see these reactions around us. Since antimatter doesn't exist around us, we don't see the light that would result from it colliding with matter.

It is possible that particles outnumbered anti-particles at the time of the Big Bang. As stated above, the collision of particles and anti-particles destroys both. And because there may have been more particles in the universe to start with, those are all that's left. There may be no naturally existing anti-particles in our universe today.

However, scientists discovered a possible deposit of antimatter near the center of the galaxy in 1977. If that does exist, it would mean that antimatter exists naturally, and the need for antimatter production would no longer be necessary.

For now, we have to create all the antimatter ourselves. Luckily, there is technology available to create antimatter through the use of high-energy particle colliders, also called "atom smashers."

Atom smashers, like CERN, are large tunnels lined with powerful supermagnets that circle around to propel atoms at near-light speeds. When an atom is sent through this accelerator, it slams into a target, creating particles. Some of these particles are antiparticles that are separated out by the magnetic field.

These high-energy particle accelerators only produce one or two picograms of antiprotons each year. A picogram is a trillionth of a gram. All of the antiprotons produced at CERN in one year would be enough to light a 100-watt electric light bulb for three seconds. It will take tons of antiprotons to travel to interstellar destinations.

antimatter space travel

NASA is possibly only a few decades away from developing an antimatter spacecraft that would cut fuel costs to a fraction of what they are today. In October 2000, NASA scientists announced early designs for an antimatter engine that could generate enormous thrust with only small amounts of antimatter fueling it. The amount of antimatter needed to supply the engine for a one-year trip to Mars could be as little as a millionth of a gram, according to a report in that month's issue of Journal of Propulsion and Power.

Matter-antimatter propulsion will be the most efficient propulsion ever developed because 100 percent of the mass of the matter and antimatter are converted into energy. When matter and antimatter collide, the energy released by their annihilation releases about 10 billion times the energy that chemical energy such as hydrogen and oxygen combustion, the kind used by the space shuttle, releases.

Matter-antimatter reactions are 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear fission produced in nuclear power plants and 300 times more powerful than nuclear fusion energy. So matter-antimatter engines have the potential to take us farther with less fuel. The problem is creating and storing the antimatter. There are three main components to a matter-antimatter engine:

  • Magnetic storage rings : Antimatter must remain separate from normal matter so storage rings with magnetic fields can move the antimatter around the ring until it is needed to create energy.
  • Feed system : When the spacecraft needs more power, the antimatter will be released to collide with a target of matter, which releases energy.
  • Magnetic rocket nozzle thruster : Like a particle collider on Earth, a long, magnetic nozzle will move the energy created by the matter-antimatter through a thruster.

antimatter space travel

Approximately 10 grams of antiprotons would be enough fuel to send a manned spacecraft to Mars in one month. Today, it takes a little less than a year for an unmanned spacecraft to reach Mars. In 1996, the Mars Global Surveyor took 11 months to arrive at Mars.

Scientists believe that the speed of a matter-antimatter powered spacecraft would allow man to go where no man has gone before in space. It would be possible to make trips to Jupiter and even beyond the heliopause, the point at which the sun 's radiation ends. But it will still be a long time before astronauts are asking their starship's helmsman to take them to warp speed.

This article was updated in conjunction with AI technology, then fact-checked and edited by a HowStuffWorks editor.

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Nothing’s the Matter With Antimatter, New Experiment Confirms

Consider it good news, physicists say: “The opposite result would have had big implications.”

A worker in a hard hat and with several straps over his clothing helps guide a tall metal tube to attach it to some sophisticated scientific machinery on the ground. Other scientists and workers in white hard hats are watching, some leaning on a railing that surrounds the contraption.

By Dennis Overbye

Antimatter just lost a little more pizazz.

Physicists know that for every fundamental particle in nature there is an antiparticle — an evil twin of identical mass and spin but endowed with equal and opposite electrical charges . When these twins meet, they obliterate each other, releasing a flash of energy on contact.

In science fiction, antiparticles provide the power for warp drives. Some physicists have speculated that antiparticles are being repelled by gravity or even traveling backward in time.

A new experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, brings some of that speculation back down to Earth. In a gravitational field, it turns out, antiparticles fall just like the rest of us. “The bottom line is that there’s no free lunch, and we’re not going to be able to levitate using antimatter,” said Joel Fajans of the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Fajans was part of an international team known as ALPHA, the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus collaboration, which is based at CERN and led by Jeffrey Hangst, a particle physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark. Dr. Fajans and his colleagues assembled about 100 anti-atoms of hydrogen and suspended them in a magnetic field. When the field was slowly ramped down, the anti-hydrogen atoms drifted down like maple leaves in October and at the same rate of downward acceleration, or g force, as regular atoms: about 32 feet per second per second. They published their result on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Few physicists were surprised by the result. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity.

“If you walk down the halls of this department and ask the physicists, they would all say that this result is not the least bit surprising,” Jonathan Wurtele , a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an announcement issued by the university. It was he who first suggested the experiment to Dr. Fajans a decade ago. “That’s the reality,” Dr. Wurtele said.

“But most of them will also say that the experiment had to be done because you never can be sure,” he added. “The opposite result would have had big implications.”

The Looking-Glass World

In 1928, in one of the most astonishing examples of nature following math, the physicist Paul Dirac found that a quantum mechanical equation describing the electron had two solutions. In one, the electron was negatively charged; this particle is the workhorse of chemistry and electricity. In the other solution, the particle was positively charged.

What was that particle? Dirac thought it was the proton, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, later famous for the atomic bomb, suggested it was a brand-new particle: a positron, identical to an electron in mass and spin but with a positive electrical charge. Two years later Carl Anderson, of the California Institute of Technology, detected positrons in cosmic ray showers, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics.

And so the lure of antimatter was born. Positively charged protons, which dominate atomic nuclei, are matched by negatively charged antiprotons. Anti-electrons are called positrons. Neutrons, which also reside in atomic nuclei, have anti-neutrons. The quarks that make up protons have anti-quarks, and so on.

In principle, there could be entire antiworlds inhabited by antibeings. The joke goes that if you met your antiself, that person would stick out a left hand to shake, but you had better not take it or you would both blow up.

For scientists, the thrill of antimatter is not simply in adding to a list of weirdly named particles. To them, studying anti-hydrogen atoms is the first step toward testing some of the deepest hypotheses about nature, which hold that antimatter should look and behave identically to ordinary matter.

For the last 20 years, scientists from the ALPHA group have been collecting antimatter at CERN, siphoning high-energy antiprotons from collisions in the CERN Proton Synchrotron and slowing them from the speed of light to speeds of a few hundred feet per second and a temperature of about 15 degrees above absolute zero. The antiprotons are then mixed with a cloud of anti-electrons, or positrons, produced by the decay of radioactive sodium, in a so-called mixing trap controlled by electrical fields.

Normal hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, consists of a positively charged proton attended by a negatively charged electron. The ALPHA experiment results in a few atoms of anti-hydrogen: The nucleus is an antiproton, and a positron circles it.

In 2002 Dr. Hangst reported that these anti-hydrogen atoms emitted and absorbed light at the same frequencies and wavelengths as regular hydrogen, just as Einstein would have predicted. Since then, many experiments, all indirect, have strongly suggested that antimatter also gravitates normally, Dr. Fajans said. But those experiments have not been conclusive, because gravity is less than one-trillionth as strong as the electromagnetic fields used to manipulate the anti-atoms.

Anti-Messages in a Bottle

antimatter space travel

In the latest experiment, the anti-hydrogen atoms were confined by a magnetic field inside a 10-inch-long metal container. Since, like hydrogen, anti-hydrogen atoms carry a slight magnetic field of their own, they bounce off the walls of this bottle.

The magnetic fields can also be tuned to counter gravity and suspend the anti-hydrogen atoms in the bottle. In the experiment, when the fields were slowly ramped down, the atoms eventually escaped the field and annihilated themselves in a flash on the walls of the chamber. About 80 percent of these flashes occurred below the chamber, according to statistical analyses. This suggests that gravity typically acts to pull anti-atoms downward, just as it would with normal matter.

Any violation of the expected symmetry between hydrogen and anti-hydrogen would have rocked physics to its core.

That did not happen, Dr. Wurtele said. “This experiment is the first time that a direct measurement of the force of gravity on neutral antimatter has been made,” he said. “It’s another step in developing the field of neutral antimatter science.”

But the result leaves hanging another puzzle. According to relativity and to quantum mechanics — the two quarreling theories that rule the universe — the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which should have annihilated each other long ago.

Yet our universe is all matter, with nary a speck of antimatter to be found outside of cosmic ray showers and particle-collider collisions. So what happened? Why does the cosmos contain something rather than nothing? The question has burned for almost a century already.

Three years ago an experiment in Japan involving the strange particles known as neutrinos reported what might be a clue to the cosmic imbalance. At the Large Hadron Collider, an entire instrument, called LHCb, is devoted to searching for any differences between matter and antimatter that could have tipped the cosmic balance.

Asked whether the results from the ALPHA experiment offered any insights for the LHCb team, Dr. Wurtele said, “Since our answer is consistent with normal gravity, I don’t think it gives any hints, unfortunately.” Which is another way of saying we still don’t know why we’re here.

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to some attributes of antiparticles. They have masses and spins identical to those of regular particles but opposite electrical charges, not opposite spins and charges. The positron discovered by Paul Dirac had a mass and spin identical to that of an electron but an opposite electrical charge, not an opposite spin and charge. The anti-protons used in the ALPHA experiment came from from the CERN Proton Synchrotron, not the Large Hadron Collider.

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Dennis Overbye joined The Times in 1998, and has been a reporter since 2001. He has written two books: “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe” and “Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.” More about Dennis Overbye

Powering the 21st Century

A Smithsonian magazine special report

Can We Power a Space Mission To An Exoplanet?

Ion engines, solar sails, antimatter rockets, nuclear fusion—several current and future technologies could someday help us fuel an interstellar journey

Joseph Stromberg

Joseph Stromberg

Fueling the trip to the exoplanet Gliese 667Cd

Every day, it seems, a new exoplanet is found (or, in the case of Tuesday, scientists discovered three potentially habitable exoplanets orbiting one star ). But there are loads of hurdles that we’ll have to clear before we ever have the chance to visit them: the massive doses of radiation that would be absorbed by would-be astronauts, the potential damage caused by interstellar dust and gas to a craft moving at extremely high speeds, and the fact that traveling to even the nearest habitable exoplanet would take almost 12 years in a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light.

The biggest problem, though, might be the enormous amount of energy such a craft would require. How do you fuel a spacecraft for a journey more than 750,000 times farther than the distance between the Earth and the Sun?

Based on our current technology for exploring space and potential future approaches, here’s a rundown of the possible ways of propelling spacecraft.

Conventional rockets

Conventional Rockets: These create thrust by burning a chemical propellant stored inside, either a solid or liquid fuel. The energy released as a result of this combustion lifts a craft out of Earth’s gravitational field and into space.

Pros: Rocket technology is well-established and well-understood, as it dates to ancient China and has been used since the very beginning of the space age. In terms of distance, its greatest achievement thus far is carrying the Voyager 1 space probe to the outer edge of the solar system, roughly 18.5 billion miles away from Earth .

Cons: The Voyager 1 is projected to run out of fuel around the year 2040 , an indication of how limited in range conventional rockets and thrusters can carry a spacecraft. Moreover, even if we could fit a sufficient amount of rocket fuel onto a spacecraft to carry it all the way to another star, the staggering fact is that we likely don’t even have enough fuel on our entire planet to do so. Brice Cassenti, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Wired that it would take an amount of energy that surpasses the current output of the entire world to send a craft to the nearest star using a conventional rocket.

The ion engine that fueled NASA’s Deep Space 1 spacecraft.

Ion engines : These work somewhat like conventional rockets, except instead of expelling the products of chemical combustion to generate thrust, they shoot out streams of electrically-charged atoms (ions). The technology was first successfully demonstrated on NASA’s 1998 Deep Space 1 mission , in which a rocket closely flew past both an asteroid and a comet to collect data, and has since been used to propel several other spacecraft, including an ongoing mission to visit the dwarf planet Ceres .

Pros: These engines produces much less thrust and initial speed than a conventional rocket—so they can’t be used to escape the Earth’s atmosphere—but once carried into space by conventional rockets, they can run continuously for much longer periods (because they use a denser fuel more efficiently), allowing a craft to gradually build up speed and surpass the velocity of one propelled by a conventional rocket.

Cons: Though faster and more efficient than conventional rockets, using an ion drive to travel to even the nearest star would still take an overwhelmingly long time— at least 19,000 years, by some estimates , which means that somewhere on the order of 600 to 2700 generations of humans would be needed to see it through. Some have suggested that ion engines could fuel a trip to Mars , but interstellar space is probably outside the realm of possibility.

A rendering of the Daedalus star ship

Nuclear Rockets: Many space exploration enthusiasts have advocated for the use of nuclear reaction-powered rockets to cover vast distances of interstellar space, dating to Project Daedalus , a theoretical British project that sought to design an unmanned probe to reach Barnard’s Star , 5.9 light-years away. Nuclear rockets would theoretically be powered by a series of controlled nuclear explosions, perhaps using pure deuterium or tritium as fuel.

Pros: Calculations have shown that a craft propelled in this way could reach speeds faster than 9000 miles per second, translating to a travel time of roughly 130 years to Alpha Centurai, the star nearest the Sun—longer than a human lifetime, but perhaps within the realm of a multi-generational mission. It’s not the Millenium Falcon making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs , but it’s something.

Cons: For one, nuclear-powered rockets are, at present, entirely hypothetical. In the short-term, they’ll probably stay that way, because the detonation of any nuclear device (whether intended as a weapon or not) in outer space would violate the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty , which permits such explosions in exactly one location: underground. Even if legally permitted, there are enormous safety concerns regarding the launch of a nuclear device into space atop a conventional rocket: An unexpected error could cause radioactive material to rain across the planet.

The Sunjammer, which features the largest solar sail ever built, is projected to launch in the fall of 2014.

Solar Sails: In comparison to all the other technologies on this list, these operate on a rather different principle: Instead of propelling a craft by burning fuel or creating other sorts of combustion, solar sails pull a vehicle by harnessing the energy of the charged particles ejected from the Sun as part of the solar wind. The first successful demonstration of such a technology was Japan’s IKAROS spacecraft , launched in 2010, which traveled towards Venus and is now journeying towards the Sun, and NASA’s Sunjammer , seven times larger, is going to launch in 2014.

Pros: Because they don’t have to carry a set amount of fuel—instead using the power of the Sun, much like a sailboat harnesses the energy of the wind—a solar sail-aided spacecraft can cruise more-or-less indefinitely.

Cons: These travel much slower than rocket-powered crafts. But more important for interstellar missions—they require the energy ejected from the Sun or another star to travel at all, making it impossible for them to traverse the vast spaces between the reach of our Sun’s solar wind and that of another star system’s. Solar sails could potentially be incorporated into a craft with other means of propelling itself, but can’t be relied upon alone for an interstellar journey.

An artist’s conception of a theoretical antimatter rocket design.

Antimatter Rockets: This proposed technology would use the products of a matter-antimatter annihilation reaction (either gamma rays or highly-charged subatomic particles called pions ) to propel a craft through space.

Pros: Using antimatter to power a rocket would theoretically be the most efficient fuel possible, as nearly all of the mass of the matter and antimatter are converted to energy when they annihilate each other. In theory, if we were able to work out the details and produce enough antimatter, we could build a spacecraft that travels at speeds nearly as fast as that of light—the highest velocity possible for any object.

Cons: We don’t yet have a way to generate enough antimatter for a space journey—estimates are that a month-long trip to Mars would require about 10 grams of antimatter . To date, we’ve only been able to create small numbers of atoms of antimatter, and doing so has consumed a large amount of fuel, making the idea of an antimatter rocket prohibitively expensive as well. Storing this antimatter is another issue: Proposed schemes involve the use of frozen pellets of antihydrogen, but these too are a far way off.

A rendering of a ramjet, which would collect hydrogen from space as it travels to use as fuel.

More speculative technologies: Scientists have proposed all sorts of radical, non-rocket-based technologies for interstellar travel. These include a craft that would harvest hydrogen from space as it travels to use in a nuclear fusion reaction, beams of light or magnetic fields shot from our own Solar System at a distant spacecraft that would be harnessed by a sail, and the use of black holes or theoretical wormholes to travel faster than the speed of light and make an interstellar journey possible in a single human’s lifetime.

All of these are extremely far away from implementation. But, if we do ever make it to another star system at all (a big if, to be sure), given the problems with most existing and near-future technologies, it might indeed be one of these pie-in-the-sky ideas that carry us there—and perhaps allow us to visit a habitable exoplanet.

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Joseph Stromberg

Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

The Large Hadron Collider reveals how far antimatter can travel through the Milky Way

An illustration of antimatter particles entering the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

The antimatter counterparts of light atomic nuclei can travel vast distances through the Milky Way before being absorbed, new findings have revealed.

As these particles travel, they potentially act as "messengers" for dark matter, so the revelation could help astronomers in the hunt for dark matter , the mysterious substance that accounts for around 85% of the universe's total mass but remains invisible because it doesn't interact with light.

Scientists at the ALICE collaboration arrived at the finding using antihelium nuclei, the antimatter equivalent of helium nuclei, created by collisions of heavy atomic nuclei at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"Our results show, for the first time on the basis of a direct absorption measurement, that antihelium-3 nuclei coming from as far as the center of our galaxy can reach near-Earth locations," ALICE physics coordinator Andrea Dainese, said in a statement .

Related : 10 cosmic mysteries the Large Hadron Collider could unravel

Although this form of antimatter can be created in particle accelerators like the LHC, there are no natural sources of antimatter nuclei or "antinuclei" on Earth . However, these anti-particles are produced naturally elsewhere in the Milky Way , with scientists favoring two possible origins. 

The first suggested source for antinuclei is the interaction between high-energy cosmic radiation, which originates from outside the solar system , with atoms in the so-called interstellar medium that fills space between stars.

The other suggested source of antinuclei is the annihilation of dark matter particles that are spread throughout the galaxy . While scientists know little about dark matter, they are certain that it is not comprised of particles like protons and neutrons that make up the everyday matter that forms stars, planets and us. Scientists believe dark matter, in contrast, is comprised of a wide range of particles with colorful names like WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and MACHOs (massive compact halo objects). One scenario suggests that when dark matter particles collide, they annihilate into particles that then decay into light matter and antimatter particles, like electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons. If dark matter annihilation is indeed a source of antimatter in the universe, antimatter could point the way to dark matter, scientists hope.

Calculating the flux 

The quest to learn more about dark matter has prompted the development of space-based missions such as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). AMS was designed at CERN, the home of the LHC, to search the cosmos for light antimatter nuclei that could indicate the presence the mysterious dark matter. 

But in order to determine whether dark matter is the source of antinucleons, scientists operating AMS and similar experiments first need to know how much light antimatter can pass through the Milky Way to reach their near-Earth locations, also known as the antiparticles' "flux." 

This flux is dependent on several factors, including the antimatter source, the rate at which it produces antinuclei, and the rate at which the antinuclei disappear as they journey from the center of our galaxy to Earth. This disappearance occurs when antimatter particles meet particles of traditional matter; either both are annihilated or the antimatter is absorbed by the matter.

The ALICE Collaboration investigated the disappearance of antimatter by using the LHC to collide lead atoms that have been ionized, or stripped of electrons. The physicists then measured how antihelium-3 nuclei created by these collisions interact with normal matter in the form of the ALICE detector. The experiment revealed for the first time the rate at which antihelium-3 nuclei disappear as they encounter ordinary matter. 

Using a computer program, the researchers then simulated the propagation of antiparticles through the galaxy and introduced to this model the disappearance rate measured at ALICE. This model allowed the researchers to extrapolate their results to the galaxy as a whole, and to look at the two suggested mechanisms of antinuclei production: One model assumed the antimatter came from cosmic-ray collisions with the interstellar medium, and the other model attributed antimatter to a hypothetical form of dark matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs).

For each of these mechanisms, the ALICE team estimated the transparency of the Milky Way to antihelium-3 nuclei — in other words, the distance antihelium-3 nuclei are free to travel before being destroyed or absorbed. The models revealed a transparency of around 50% in the dark matter model and a transparency ranging from 25% to 90% in the cosmic ray collision model, depending on the energy of the antinuclei created.

These values show that antihelium-3 nuclei originating from either process can travel long distances — up to several kiloparsecs, with each kiloparsec equivalent to around 3,300 light-years. (The Milky Way is about 30 kiloparsecs wide, according to NASA .)

— How the antimatter-hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer works (infographic) — How much of the universe is dark matter? — Stars made of antimatter could exist in the Milky Way  

The results could be important in future experiments that count how many antinuclei arrive around Earth and with what energies in hopes of determining whether the origin of these antiparticles is cosmic-ray collisions or dark matter annihilation. 

"Our findings demonstrate that searches for light antimatter nuclei from outer space remain a powerful way to hunt for dark matter," ALICE spokesperson Luciano Musa said in the same statement.

The research is described in a paper published Monday (Dec. 12) in the journal Nature Physics .

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Robert Lea

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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  • rod "The first suggested source for antinuclei is the interaction between high-energy cosmic radiation, which originates from outside the solar system, with atoms in the so-called interstellar medium that fills space between stars. The other suggested source of antinuclei is the annihilation of dark matter particles that are spread throughout the galaxy. While scientists know little about dark matter, they are certain that it is not comprised of particles like protons and neutrons that make up the everyday matter that forms stars, planets and us. Scientists believe dark matter, in contrast, is comprised of a wide range of particles with colorful names like WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and MACHOs (massive compact halo objects). One scenario suggests that when dark matter particles collide, they annihilate into particles that then decay into light matter and antimatter particles, like electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons. If dark matter annihilation is indeed a source of antimatter in the universe, antimatter could point the way to dark matter, scientists hope." So, is DM confirmed in this report as to DM being a WIMP or MACHO? The paper, Measurement of anti-3He nuclei absorption in matter and impact on their propagation in the Galaxy | Nature Physics States, "Propagation modellingThe possible sources of antinuclei in our Galaxy are either cosmic-ray interactions with nuclei in the interstellar gas or more exotic sources such as DM annihilations or decays. Cosmic rays mainly consist of protons and originate from supernovae remnants, whereas DM has so far escaped direct or indirect detection but its density profile can be modelled88."...Although coalescence-based models can successfully describe antinuclei production, the model uncertainties are still relatively large, which leads to substantial changes in the magnitude of antinuclei fluxes22,30,61." Apparently, DM is not nailed down yet as to exactly what it is. Reply
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NASA's Antimatter Propulsion System: A Revolution in Space Travel

NASA, the national aeronautics and space administration, has announced a breakthrough in propulsion technology that could revolutionize space travel as we know it. The new antimatter propulsion system, or AMPS, is a type of propulsion that uses antimatter particles to generate thrust.

NASA's Antimatter Propulsion System: A Revolution in Space Travel

Antimatter is a highly exotic and rare form of matter that is the opposite of normal matter. It has the same mass as normal matter, but it has opposite charge and other subatomic properties. When antimatter particles come into contact with normal matter, they annihilate each other, releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process. NASA’s AMPS harnesses this energy to generate thrust and propel a spacecraft forward.

The technology behind AMPS has been in development for decades, but it is only now that NASA has been able to successfully produce and store enough antimatter to power a propulsion system. According to NASA’s chief of propulsion science, Dr. XYZ, “The possibilities with this new propulsion system are truly exciting. Antimatter has the potential to provide much higher specific impulse than chemical or even nuclear propulsion, which would greatly reduce travel time for missions to other planets or even other stars. This would be a giant leap forward in space exploration, and we can’t wait to see where this technology takes us.”

One of the biggest advantages of AMPS is its high specific impulse, or efficiency. Specific impulse is a measure of how effectively a propulsion system converts fuel into thrust, and it is often used as a benchmark for comparing different propulsion systems. It is estimated that an antimatter propulsion system could have a specific impulse several orders of magnitude greater than current chemical propulsion systems, such as the space shuttle’s main engines. This means that spacecraft powered by AMPS could travel much faster and farther than current spacecraft, making interplanetary and interstellar travel a reality.

Another significant advantage is the high energy density of antimatter which allows for much smaller and more compact propulsion system. With AMPS, the spacecraft can carry smaller amount of fuel and thus have more space for scientific instruments and other payloads, which are crucial for missions where weight is a critical factor.

However, there are also some significant challenges associated with the technology. One of the biggest obstacles is the cost and difficulty of producing and storing antimatter. Currently, it takes billions of dollars to produce even a tiny amount of antimatter, and it is difficult to store and contain the particles safely. Specialized magnetic fields are used to contain the antimatter particles and prevent them from coming into contact with normal matter. There are also some concerns about the environmental impact of producing antimatter on such a large scale.

Despite these challenges, NASA and other researchers are excited about the potential of antimatter propulsion and are looking to develop the technology further in the coming years. NASA plans to test the AMPS in the next decade, with the aim of having a fully operational system within 20–30 years. With the AMPS, space travel is going to be revolutionized, and it could potentially open the door to new frontiers in space exploration. This technology is the key to faster, more efficient space travel and could be a game changer for future space missions and exploration.

In conclusion, NASA’s new antimatter propulsion system represents a major breakthrough in space travel technology. It offers the potential for much higher specific impulse, faster and farther travel, and more efficient space travel. But, it is not without its challenges. The development of this technology will take significant time and funding, but the benefits of successful development could be truly revolutionary for space exploration.

This story is fake. None of it was written by a human. I t is part of an experiment looking into the role artificial intelligence will play in the creation of fake news in the near future . Results will be published on the 1st of February. Make sure to sign up to get them.

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Interstellar travel: From science fiction to reality

Humans may one day travel beyond the solar system on board rockets powered by nuclear fusion.

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

Sarwat Nasir author image

Only two probes have reached interstellar space – the region beyond the solar system – since the start of human space exploration .

It took more than three decades for the first spacecraft, Voyager 1 , to cross the heliopause, a boundary scientists believe is where interstellar space begins, after its launch in 1977.

It was an incredible achievement with invaluable data sent back through a medium not influenced by the Sun.

But with its power supply weakening it is almost impossible Voyager 1 will reach our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away and would take the probe almost 73,000 years.

Les Johnson, a Nasa scientist and author of several scientific and science fiction books, told The National reaching another star could take 50 to 100 years.

“It is possible we might have the technology to send our first robotic probe to another star within the next 50 to 100 years,” said Mr Johnson, who managed the Interstellar Propulsion Research Project at the US space agency.

“Based on the rate of technology growth, after looking at all the propulsion systems that are based on known physics, I believe these first probes will be propelled to the stars using laser light reflecting from a sail, similar to today’s solar sails but driven by intense laser light instead of sunlight.”

Human travel to interstellar space

It could take significantly longer for a crewed mission to travel to another star, as laser light sails would only work for smaller spacecraft.

Nuclear fusion propulsion, a way of powering a spacecraft using high-energy particles created by fusion reactions, is needed to make human missions to interstellar space possible.

“As for humans, that’s a lot more complicated because it takes a lot of mass to keep a group of humans alive for a decade- to centuries-long space journey and that means a massive ship,” Mr Johnson said.

Nasa scientist and author Les Johnson. Photo: Les Johnson

“For a human crewed ship, we will need fusion propulsion at a minimum and antimatter as the ideal.

“While we know these are physically possible, the technology level needed for interstellar travel seems very far away – perhaps 100 to 200 years in the future.”

While scientists dream of antimatter propulsion, which could enable space travel at 70 per cent of the speed of light, nuclear fusion propulsion appears much closer to reality.

The technology could also help reduce the time it takes to reach Mars, the planet to which most space agencies are trying to send their astronauts.

Laura Forczyk, an author and the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, said nuclear fusion propulsion has the potential to revolutionise space flight.

"We will not be able to achieve interstellar travel until we engineer a faster and more efficient means of accelerating," said Ms Forczyk.

"We also need to develop long-term, self-sustained robust ecosystems for long-duration voyages and a better means of radiation shielding. We are at least a century away from these advances."

While developing nuclear fusion technology is not easy, with the required temperature to achieve it 10 times hotter than the Sun, a few companies have been trying for many years.

antimatter space travel

California-based start-up Helicity Space recently received $5 million in seed funding to accelerate its fusion propulsion technology projects.

UK-based start-up Pulsar Fusion is also attempting to develop the technology and has started construction on a large nuclear fusion chamber in England.

When the engine is fired, it would, at least temporarily, be the hottest place in the solar system.

China is also trying to advance the development of nuclear fusion, with reports of a new state-owned company that would help accelerate the production of an "artificial Sun".

Is there an Earth-like planet beyond the solar system?

One of the reasons scientists want to explore interstellar space is to learn more about the universe and possibilities of life beyond Earth.

Nasa has been studying exoplanets, or planets outside of the solar system, for decades by using telescopes.

Mr Johnson said he "doubts we will find Earth 2.0 anywhere close" and that discovering another home-like planet was not thought to be a near-term possibility.

"Over time, we might be able to modify another planet to make it habitable but that will likely take additional centuries or millennia," he said.

"That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go. The job of science is to learn more about the universe in which we live.

"Studying planets around other stars will help us better understand our own solar system and expand our knowledge of this big universe. That alone, in my opinion, makes the journey one we should make."

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Antimatter Could Travel Through Our Galaxy With Ease, Physicists Say

A team of physicists determined that enigmatic ‘antinuclei’ can travel across the universe without being absorbed by the interstellar medium. The finding suggests we may be able to identify antimatter that is produced by dark matter in deep space.

The physicists estimated the Milky Way’s so-called transparency to antihelium-3 nuclei—meaning, how permissive the galaxy’s interstellar medium is to antinuclei zipping through space.

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“Our results show, for the first time on the basis of a direct absorption measurement, that antihelium-3 nuclei coming from as far as the centre of our Galaxy can reach near-Earth locations,” said ALICE physics coordinator Andrea Dainese, in a CERN release .

Antimatter is not merely the stuff of sci-fi novels. It is a real, naturally occurring mirror to ordinary matter. Antimatter particles have the same mass but the opposite charges of their ordinary counterparts. Where electrons have a negative charge, their antimatter analogues, positrons, have a positive charge. Protons’ antimatter partners are the more simply named antiprotons.

This principle can be scaled up to the atomic level: Every atom has a nucleus—a core of protons and neutrons glommed together—but there are also antinuclei, composed of antiprotons and antineutrons. We know these exist because they were discovered in an experiment in 1965 , when physicists observed antideuterons (the antimatter version of the deuterium atom) in a lab.

The universe rocked into being 14 billion years ago, with a Big Bang that in theory should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter . But look around you, or at the latest Webb telescope image s: We live in a universe dominated by matter. An outstanding question in physics is what happened to all the antimatter .

The recent research team—a large, international collaboration of physicists—worked with the ALICE detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, beneath the ground near St Genis-Pouilly, France, to try to get a step closer to spotting the mysterious stuff.

ALICE ( A Large Ion Collider Experiment ) is an 11,000-ton detector that investigates collisions between heavy ions and other particles, which allows physicists to probe some of the smallest, primordial, and most exotic masses in our universe.

In the recent experiment, the ALICE Collaboration attempted to measure the rate at which antihelium-3 nuclei (isotopes of helium’s antimatter counterpart) disappeared when they encountered ordinary matter. Their research is published in Nature Physics.

An artist’s conception of ALICE (left) and the Milky Way galaxy (right).

The study is not as much about the remarkable distances the antimatter particles can travel but “how many of the produced antihelium-3 would reach the detectors,” said study-co-author Laura Šerkšnytė, a physicist at Technische Universität Munchen and a member of the ALICE Collaboration, in an email to Gizmodo.

In other words, the team’s research is a helpful indicator that cosmic antinuclei detectors, like the AMS experiment aboard the International Space Station and the upcoming GAPS balloon experiment in Antarctica, will have a fair chance at finding the vexing particles.

There are a few candidates for natural antinuclei sources in the universe; one is high-energy cosmic ray collisions with atoms in the interstellar medium, the stuff that occupies the space between stars. Another candidate—a core component of the recent study—is that a certain flavor of theorized dark matter particles called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) emit antinuclei when they annihilate.

A third, more exotic idea is that antinuclei are given off by antistars, a theoretical object that—you guessed it—is a star composed entirely of antimatter .

Antinuclei from cosmic rays’ interactions with regular matter would have much higher energies associated with them than antinuclei born from dark matter annihilation events. There’s never been a confirmed detection of cosmic light antinuclei (‘cosmic,’ meaning they float through space, and ‘light,’ referring to their mass). Without detections of such antimatter particles in the wild, physicists’ best bet is in accelerators like the LHC.

The ALICE Collaboration separately modeled the Milky Way’s transparency to antinuclei that would emerge from dark matter WIMPs and cosmic ray collisions. They found a 50% transparency for the dark matter model and a range of 25% to 90% transparency for the cosmic ray model.

By their measure, antihelium-3 nuclei could make it several kiloparsecs (thousands of light-years) without being absorbed by ordinary matter in the interstellar medium.

“The idea of the paper was to show this transparency, and the fact that we can now use our measurement in all the future studies,” Šerkšnytė said.

The transparencies showed that “these antinuclei could actually be measured in principle,” Šerkšnytė added, noting that having these measurements gives future research teams a means of interpreting data from light antinuclei searches—in turn informing the search for dark matter.

So the findings are redeeming for antimatter nuclei detectors like AMS aboard the ISS and the GAPS balloon mission. AMS has so far collected data on 213 billion cosmic ray events and counting, troves upon troves of data to sift through for signs of antimatter. The second iteration of the experiment detected a few antihelium candidates in cosmic rays. Results from GAPS—expected to fly in late 2023—could independently confirm AMS’s antihelium detections.

You can think of the new research as idiomatic horse, which needs to be before the cart if you’re planning to get anywhere soon. If physicists want to move forward in their understanding of the antimatter universe—where it is and how we can find it—and learn more about dark matter, they need to be able to find some antinuclei.

More: Could Antimatter Be the Portal Into the Dark Universe?

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Nasa’s fermi catches thunderstorms hurling antimatter into space.

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Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.

Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.

“These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams,” said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Fermi is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter striking Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays. The GBM has detected gamma rays with energies of 511,000 electron volts, a signal indicating an electron has met its antimatter counterpart, a positron.

Although Fermi’s GBM is designed to observe high-energy events in the universe, it’s also providing valuable insights into this strange phenomenon. The GBM constantly monitors the entire celestial sky above and the Earth below. The GBM team has identified 130 TGFs since Fermi’s launch in 2008.

“In orbit for less than three years, the Fermi mission has proven to be an amazing tool to probe the universe. Now we learn that it can discover mysteries much, much closer to home,” said Ilana Harrus, Fermi program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The spacecraft was located immediately above a thunderstorm for most of the observed TGFs, but in four cases, storms were far from Fermi. In addition, lightning-generated radio signals detected by a global monitoring network indicated the only lightning at the time was hundreds or more miles away. During one TGF, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 2,800 miles to the south. The distant storm was below Fermi’s horizon, so any gamma rays it produced could not have been detected.

“Even though Fermi couldn’t see the storm, the spacecraft nevertheless was magnetically connected to it,” said Joseph Dwyer at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. “The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft.”

The beam continued past Fermi, reached a location, known as a mirror point, where its motion was reversed, and then hit the spacecraft a second time just 23 milliseconds later. Each time, positrons in the beam collided with electrons in the spacecraft. The particles annihilated each other, emitting gamma rays detected by Fermi’s GBM.

graphic depicting how Fermi detected a terrestrial gamma-ray flash

Scientists long have suspected TGFs arise from the strong electric fields near the tops of thunderstorms. Under the right conditions, they say, the field becomes strong enough that it drives an upward avalanche of electrons. Reaching speeds nearly as fast as light, the high-energy electrons give off gamma rays when they’re deflected by air molecules. Normally, these gamma rays are detected as a TGF.

But the cascading electrons produce so many gamma rays that they blast electrons and positrons clear out of the atmosphere. This happens when the gamma-ray energy transforms into a pair of particles: an electron and a positron. It’s these particles that reach Fermi’s orbit.

The detection of positrons shows many high-energy particles are being ejected from the atmosphere. In fact, scientists now think that all TGFs emit electron/positron beams. A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.

thumbnail image of PDF showing how thunderstorms launch particle beams into space

“The Fermi results put us a step closer to understanding how TGFs work,” said Steven Cummer at Duke University. “We still have to figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process.”

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. It is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

The GBM Instrument Operations Center is located at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. The team includes a collaboration of scientists from UAH, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and other institutions.

By Francis Reddy NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center , Greenbelt, Md.

The UBJ

Exploring the Potential of Antimatter as the Key to Interstellar Exploration

W hile the likes of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise have made interstellar travel a staple of science fiction, actual ventures into deep space remain a thing of the future.

Antimatter —once a mere element of such fictional narratives—does indeed exist in reality.

Antimatter, which Elon Musk called “ the ticket for interstellar journeys, ” has the potential to revolutionize the way we travel between the stars due to its immense energy-producing capabilities.

According to Ryan Weed of Positron Dynamics, antimatter is created from particles that mirror those of regular matter, but with opposite electric charges. This contrast causes matter and antimatter to annihilate when they come into contact, releasing a staggering amount of energy in the process.

For instance, a mere gram of antimatter could unleash an explosion rivaling that of a nuclear bomb, indicating its power to drastically accelerate spacecraft at remarkable speeds.

However, despite the fact that such an engine could shorten the journey to our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima, to a mere five years, its development has been hindered by both cost and technical challenges.

Gerald Jackson, an expert in the field, suggests that if adequate funding were available, an antimatter spacecraft prototype could be built within a decade. Albeit the core techniques exist, antimatter remains the priciest substance on Earth, with Jackson estimating an initial $8 billion needed just to build the required solar power infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Weed explores alternative techniques involving the natural production of less powerful—yet more accessible—forms of antimatter, such as positrons.

Experts believe that until a pressing need for rapid deep space travel arises, progress in antimatter propulsion will be slow. Nevertheless, the potential for such technology to unlock a new chapter in human space exploration remains a driving force behind ongoing research.

This story is based on an original report by Business Insider .

FAQs about Antimatter and Interstellar Travel

What exactly is antimatter?

Antimatter consists of particles that are similar to those of regular matter but have opposite electric charges. When antimatter comes into contact with matter, they annihilate each other, releasing large amounts of energy.

Could antimatter propel spacecraft to other star systems?

In theory, yes. The energy produced from matter-antimatter annihilation could be used to accelerate a spacecraft to a fraction of the speed of light, offering the potential for interstellar travel.

Why don’t we use antimatter engines now?

Current barriers to the use of antimatter in propulsion systems include the extremely high cost of creating antimatter and technical challenges related to harnessing its energy efficiently and safely.

How far are we from creating antimatter propulsion systems?

If significant funding were put into research and development, some experts believe we could see an antimatter propulsion prototype within a decade.

Is antimatter dangerous?

Yes, due to the massive amounts of energy released during annihilation, antimatter must be handled with extreme caution to avoid explosive reactions.

In the pursuit of transforming science fiction into reality, antimatter presents a promising frontier for interstellar propulsion. While the practicalities of producing and harnessing this exceptional energy source pose formidable challenges, the dream of navigating the cosmos with unprecedented speed propels scientists and visionaries forward. As researchers continue to advance our understanding and ability to manipulate antimatter, the notion of voyaging to distant stars grows ever closer from the realm of imagination to feasible technology. The path is fraught with hurdles, both economic and technical, but the potential rewards keep the quest for antimatter-propelled space travel well within the scope of human ingenuity and ambition.

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Antimatter Could Unlock A Radical New Future Of Interstellar Travel, New Report Says

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In the realm of science fiction, interstellar travel has long been depicted as a fantastical concept, reserved for the imaginations of writers and filmmakers. However, recent developments in physics have brought this once-fictional idea closer to reality. Antimatter, often portrayed in popular media as a futuristic energy source, is not merely a figment of imagination but a tangible element with immense potential.

Antimatter, composed of particles possessing opposite electric charges to regular matter, holds the promise of unparalleled energy generation through annihilation when it comes into contact with conventional matter. Weed, CEO of Positron Dynamics, elucidates this potential, highlighting how a minute quantity of antimatter could yield energy equivalent to a nuclear explosion. The allure of such colossal energy lies in its capacity to propel spacecraft at unprecedented velocities, enabling expedited voyages across vast cosmic distances.

Weed’s projections envision antimatter-powered spacecraft drastically reducing travel times within our solar system and beyond. The theoretical possibility of reaching Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system, in merely five years stands in stark contrast to the decades-long journeys undertaken by contemporary spacecraft. However, despite the tantalizing prospects offered by antimatter propulsion, the primary hurdle remains its exorbitant cost rather than technological limitations.

antimatter space travel

Gerald Jackson, a proponent of antimatter propulsion, emphasizes the feasibility of developing prototypes given adequate funding. While physicists have demonstrated the ability to produce antimatter particles, the prohibitively high costs associated with their production hinder widespread implementation. Jackson’s vision extends to conceptualizing antimatter-based space sails, offering a potential solution for decelerating spacecraft upon reaching distant celestial bodies.

Weed’s innovative approach focuses on harnessing positrons, the lighter counterparts to antiprotons, for propulsion systems. Unlike their more massive counterparts, positrons occur naturally, presenting a cost-effective alternative for antimatter production. Weed’s concept revolves around utilizing krypton-79 to extract high-energy positrons, subsequently leveraging their annihilation with regular matter to initiate fusion reactions for spacecraft propulsion. However, the practical implementation of such a system remains financially daunting due to the challenges associated with moderating highly energetic positrons.

antimatter space travel

Despite numerous proposals and conceptual designs for antimatter propulsion spanning decades, significant challenges persist in translating these ideas into tangible realities. Engineers and astrophysicists emphasize the formidable engineering intricacies involved in harnessing and controlling the immense energy generated by antimatter. Safety concerns during testing underscore the necessity for secure testing facilities, with suggestions ranging from lunar bases to mitigate potential risks to terrestrial environments.

While antimatter propulsion holds immense promise for revolutionizing space travel, its practical realization hinges on overcoming formidable technological, financial, and safety challenges. The collective optimism of scientists and engineers underscores the imperative of exploring unconventional yet plausible ideas to propel humanity further into the cosmos, albeit acknowledging the gradual pace of progress absent compelling incentives driving interstellar exploration.

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An antimatter spaceship for Mars?

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If you're a science fiction reader, you know that spaceships are using antimatter to travel through space. Now NASA is working on such a spaceship to go to Mars in 45 days using only 10 milligrams of anti-electrons -- or positrons -- for the round trip mission. These positrons will emit gamma rays with about 400 times less energy than the ones emitted by antiprotons used in previous designs. Such a rocket would be much safer because it would reduce the time to travel to Mars and because there should be no leftover radiation after the fuel is used. There are still some remaining issues, such as the cost -- $250 million for 10 milligrams -- and the storage of antimatter which would have to be contained with electric and magnetic fields. But it's permitted to dream, isn't?

If such a small quantity of antimatter can propel a spaceship to Mars -- and even further -- why hasn't been tried before?

Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts ( NIAC ) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.

Here is a short explanation.

When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.
Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.

Below is a diagram of a rocket powered by a positron reactor (Credit: Positronics Research, LLC). And here is a link to a larger version .

Positrons are directed from the storage unit to the attenuating matrix, where they interact with the material and release heat. Liquid hydrogen (H2) circulates through the attenuating matrix and picks up the heat. The hydrogen then flows to the nozzle exit (bell-shaped area in yellow and blue), where it expands into space, producing thrust.

Such an engine would be safer for the astronauts and for the environment for several reasons: it would reduce the travel time to Mars, increasing safety for the crew by reducing their exposure to cosmic rays; the reactor would not be radioactive after its fuel is used; and there should be no risk for the public even if the reactor exploded during its launch because "gamma rays would be gone in an instant."

So when will see such spaceships? It's hard to tell because some technical and financial issues still need to be addressed and solved.

"A rough estimate to produce the 10 milligrams of positrons needed for a human Mars mission is about 250 million dollars using technology that is currently under development," said Dr. Gerald Smith [of Positronics Research, LLC , in Santa Fe, New Mexico]. This cost might seem high, but it has to be considered against the extra cost to launch a heavier chemical rocket (current launch costs are about $10,000 per pound) or the cost to fuel and make safe a nuclear reactor. "Based on the experience with nuclear technology, it seems reasonable to expect positron production cost to go down with more research," added Smith.
Another challenge is storing enough positrons in a small space. Because they annihilate normal matter, you can't just stuff them in a bottle. Instead, they have to be contained with electric and magnetic fields. "We feel confident that with a dedicated research and development program, these challenges can be overcome," said Smith.

But if these technical hurdles are overcome, "the first humans to reach Mars will arrive in spaceships powered by the same source that fired starships across the universes of our science fiction dreams."

Sources: NASA news release, April 14, 2006; and various web sites

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Anti-Matter Spacecraft: Could NASA’s New Propulsion System Be the Future of Interstellar Travel?

Almost everyday, astronomes are discovering new exoplanets, some of which have the potential to be inhabitable. However, the vast distances between star systems limit our space exploration to our solar system.

Anti-Matter Spacecraft: Could NASA’s New Propulsion System Be the Future of Interstellar Travel?

Interstellar travel is a journey that humanity has only achieved in science fiction. In movies like Star Trek, spacecraft use antimatter propulsion systems to travel at high speeds. By using this technology, humans can travel to different planets and stars more efficiently and more quickly.

What are Antimatter Spacecraft?

Antimatter  refers to a highly exotic and rare form of matter which is the exact opposite of normal matter. It has the same mass as normal matter, but contains opposite charge and other subatomic particles. When antimatter and normal matter come into contact with each other, they could release a tremendous amount of energy as the particles are annihilated.

The existence of antimatter was first confirmed by Carl Anderson in 1932 when he discovered positrons. Since then, scientists have studied the potential of antimatter in establishing antimatter-based propulsion systems for interstellar travel. As Elon Musk noted, antimatter power is "the ticket for interstellar journeys".

One of the benefits of this kind of energy is that it can be used in accelerating or decelerating spacecraft at immense speeds. Just one gram of antimatter can generate an explosion which is equivalent to a nuclear bomb. This is the kind of energy that can take humanity to places that no one has gone before at record speed.

Theoretically, an antimatter engine can accelerate a spacecraft at 9.8 meters per second squared to get to Proxima, the nearest star system, in only five years. This is almost 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 to travel about half the distance. Even within our solar system, a spacecraft powered by antimatter can reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks compared to the 9.5 years it took New Horizons probe to arrive.

Despite their tremendous capabilities, antimatter engines are still not yet developed here on Earth due to the cost that comes with the technology. Physicists have made antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms using powerful particle accelerators. However, this type of antimatter is also considered as the most expensive substance on Earth.

READ ALSO: Generating Antimatter by High-Intensity Lasers Possible by Producing Plasma-Level Energy Similar to Neutron Star

Proposed Antimatter-Based Propulsion

Just recently, NASA announced a breakthrough in space travel by developing an antimatter propulsion system (AMS). While the technology has been around for decades, it is only now that NASA has successfully produced and stored enough antimatter particles to generate thrust.

In the paper "Antimatter-Based Propulsion for Exoplanet Exploration,"  Dr. Gerald P. Jackson focuses on the physics responsible for the propulsion system to work. He gave emphasis on nuclear fission and described an electrostatic nozzle and trap which is meant to carry out this nuclear process.

Aside from cost, there are other obstacles associated with this technology. It is currently difficult to store and contain the particles safely, so specialized magnetic fields must be used to contain the antimatter particles and prevent them from coming into contact with normal matter.

There are also concerns about the environmental impact of producing antimatter particles on a large scale. Despite these challenges, NASA plans to develop the technology further in the next decade and make it fully operational within 20-30 years.

RELATED ARTICLE: Antimatter's Gravitational Reality: New Experiment Confirms Gravity Pulls It Down, Debunking Antigravity Hopes

Check out more news and information on Antimatter  in Science Times.

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How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years

Interstellar travel is only something humanity has achieved in science fiction — like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, which used antimatter engines to travel across star systems.

But antimatter isn’t just a sci-fi trope. Antimatter really exists.

Elon Musk has called antimatter power “ the ticket for interstellar journeys, ” and physicists like Ryan Weed are exploring how to harness it.

Antimatter is made up of particles almost exactly like regular matter but with opposite electric charge. That means when antimatter contacts regular matter, they both annihilate and can produce enormous amounts of energy.

“Annihilation of antimatter and matter converts mass directly into energy,” Weed, cofounder and CEO of Positron Dynamics, a company working to develop an antimatter propulsion system, told Business Insider.

Just one gram of antimatter could generate an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb. It’s that kind of energy, some say, that could boldly take us where no one has gone before at record speed.

Space travel at record speed

The benefit of all that energy is that it can be used to either accelerate or decelerate spacecraft at break-neck speeds.

For example, let’s take a trip to our nearest star system, Proxima , about 4.2 light years away.

An antimatter engine could theoretically accelerate a spacecraft at 1g (9.8 meters per second squared) getting us to Proxima in just five years, Weed said in 2016 . That’s 8,000 times faster than it would take Voyager 1 — one of the fastest spacecraft in history — to travel about half the distance, according to NASA .

Even within our own solar system, an antimatter-powered spacecraft could reach Pluto in 3.5 weeks compared to the 9.5 years it took NASA’s New Horizons probe to arrive, Weed said.

Why we don’t have antimatter engines

The reason we don’t have antimatter engines, despite their tremendous capabilities, comes down to cost, not tech.

Gerald Jackson, an accelerator physicist who worked on antimatter projects at Fermilab, told Forbes in 2016 that with enough funding, we could have an antimatter spacecraft prototype within a decade.

The basic technology is there. Physicists armed with the world’s most powerful particle accelerators have made antiprotons and antihydrogen atoms.

The issue is that this type of antimatter is incredibly expensive to make. It’s considered the most expensive substance on Earth. Jackson gave us an idea of just how much an antimatter machine would cost to build and maintain.

Jackson is the founder, president, and CEO of Hbar Technologies, which is working on a concept for an antimatter space sail to decelerate spacecraft traveling 1% to 10% the speed of light — a useful design for entering into orbit around a distant star, planet, or moon that you want to study.

Jackson said he’s designed an asymmetric proton collider that could produce 20 grams of antimatter per year.

“For a 10-kilogram scientific package traveling at 2% of the speed of light, 35 grams of antimatter is needed to decelerate the spacecraft down and inject it into orbit around Proxima Centauri,” Jackson told BI.

He said it would take $8 billion to build a solar power plant for the enormous energy needs of antimatter production and cost $670 million per year to operate.

The idea is just that, for now. “There is currently no serious funding for advanced space propulsion concepts,” Jackson said.

However, there are other ways to produce antimatter. That’s where Weed focused his work.

Weed’s concept involves positrons, the antimatter version of an electron.

A different kind of antimatter engine

Positrons “are several thousand times lighter than antiprotons and don’t pack quite as much punch when annihilating,” Weed said.

The advantage, however, is that they occur naturally and don’t need a giant accelerator and billions of dollars to make.

Weed’s antimatter propulsion system is designed to use krypton-79 — a form of the element krypton that naturally emits positrons .

The engine system would first gather high-energy positrons from krypton-79 and then direct them toward a layer of regular matter, producing annihilation energy. That energy would then trigger a powerful fusion reaction to generate thrust for the spacecraft.

While positrons may be less expensive to obtain than more powerful forms of antimatter, they are difficult to harness because they are highly energetic and need to be slowed down, or “moderated.” So building a prototype to test in space is still beyond reach, cost-wise, Weed said.

Such is the case for all antimatter propulsion designs . Over the decades, scientists have proposed dozens of concepts, none of which have come to fruition.

For example, in 1953, Austrian physicist Eugen Sänger proposed a “photon rocket” that would run on positron annihilation energy. And since the ’80s, there’s been talk of thermal antimatter engines, which would use antimatter to heat liquid, gas, or plasma to provide thrust.

“It’s not sci-fi, but we aren’t going to see it flying until there is a significant ‘mission-pull,’” Weed said about his engine concept.

Can it work?

To build Weed’s concept at the scale of a starship, “the devil’s in the engineering details,” Paul M. Sutter, an astrophysicist and host of “Ask a Spaceman” podcast, told BI.

“We’re talking about a device that harnesses truly enormous amounts of energy, requiring exquisite balance and control,” Sutter said.

That enormous energy is another obstacle holding us back from revolutionizing space travel. Because during testing, “if something goes wrong, these are big explosions,” Steve Howe, a physicist who worked on antimatter concepts with NASA in the ’90s, told BI.

“So we need an ability to test high energy density systems somewhere that don’t threaten the biosphere, but still allow us to develop them,” said Howe, who thinks the moon would make a good testing base. “And if something goes wrong, you melted a piece of the moon,” and not Earth, he added.

Antimatter tends to bring out the imagination in everyone who works on them. “But, we need crazy but plausible ideas to make it further into space, so it’s worth looking into,” Sutter said.

Weed echoes the sentiment, saying “until there is a compelling reason to get to the Kuiper Belt , the Solar Gravitational Lens, or Alpha Centauri really quickly — or perhaps we are trying to return large asteroids for mining — progress will continue to be slow in this area.”

The post How antimatter engines could fly humans to other stars in just a few years appeared first on Business Insider .

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  • NASA - Antimatter Factory on Sun Yields Clues to Solar Explosions
  • NASA - Antimatter Propulsion
  • NASA - Near Earth Asteroid Discovery Statistics
  • NASA - Riding the Plasma Wave
  • NASA - Plasma, Plasma, Everywhere
  • NASA - Space Probes Detect Enormous Natural Particle Accelerator
  • Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot of Black Hole Jets
  • The Astrophysical Journal Letters: THE DISCOVERY OF GEOMAGNETICALLY TRAPPED COSMIC-RAY ANTIPROTONS http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/737/2/L29/
  • Extraction of Antiparticles Concentrated in Planetary Magnetic Fields
  • Overview of The High Performance Antiproton Trap (HiPAT) Experiment
  • COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION AND USE OF ANTIPROTONS
  • Antimatter Space Propulsion www.engr.psu.edu/antimatter/
  • Hubble Space Telescope Photograph
  • James Webb Space Telescope
  • NASA Image and Video Library
  • The Milky Way panorama
  • Space Settlements: A Design Study
  • Stability of Lagrange Points: James Webb Space Telescope
  • John F. Kennedy Speech - Rice Stadium
  • Sept. 14, 1966 - Gemini XI Artificial Gravity Experiment
  • The Invention Secrecy Act of 1951
  • Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)
  • Cosmic Lenses Support Findings on Accelerated Universe Expansion
  • Propulsion Physics under the Changing Density Field Model
  • Vortex Formation in the Wake of Dark Matter Propulsion
  • Wake Vortex Research
  • Observation of stationary spontaneous Hawking radiation and the time evolution of an analogue black hole
  • Experimental observation of acceleration-induced thermality (Unruh effect)
  • Warp Field Mechanics 101
  • Hubble Finds Birth Certificate of Oldest Known Star
  • A view of the M87 supermassive black hole in polarised light (Credit: EHT Collaboration)
  • The density field of the local Universe
  • NASA Captures First Air-to-Air Images of Supersonic Shockwave Interaction in Flight
  • Hubble Provides Interstellar Road Map for Voyagers' Galactic Trek
  • UFO Videos from the U.S. Navy
  • High temperature methane emissions from Large Igneous Provinces as contributors to late Permian mass extinctions
  • 700,000 years of tropical Andean glaciation
  • Holocene extinction
  • Impacts of Waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations on Water Quality
  • History of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system

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Space travel is the next frontier in tourism, but is it a marketing opportunity?

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antimatter space travel

By Joanna Lewis | Head of content

The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

February 28, 2024 | 8 min read

Listen to article 4 min

Space tourism used to be the reserve of sci-fi. But, says Joanna Lewis of Relevance, a trip to space is increasingly a reality – if you can afford the price tag.

A graphic of a rocket blasting through space

More and more people are taking trips beyond the Earth's atmosphere, says Joanna Lewis / Freepik

Space travel is the new frontier for ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI), giving the world’s wealthiest travelers the chance to view life on Earth from a whole new perspective.

Commercial flights into space are becoming more routine, with the race for space travel being led by Virgin Galactic , SpaceX , Blue Origin, and Space Adventures. However, space tourism remains the reserve of the world’s richest individuals, with space travel companies focusing their marketing efforts on UHNWIs and billionaires.

According to research by UBS, the space tourism market is expected to reach a value of US$3bn (£2.4bn) by 2030. And it’s not surprising, given the global UHNW population in 2022 was 395,070, according to Wealth-X, with a combined wealth of $45,430bn. The total billionaire population stands at 3,194 individuals, with a collective wealth of $11,107bn.

Not only will space tourism add an exciting dimension to where UHNWIs vacation , but it will also provide a lucrative market for successful space tourism companies.

What are the different types of space travel ?

There are several different types of space travel, including orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism. Currently, space tourism is primarily focused on orbital and suborbital.

Suborbital space tourism is when the spacecraft reaches space but doesn’t break the gravitational border. Space tourism is currently dominated by suborbital spaceflights, with space travel companies Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin dominating this market. Suborbital flights typically reach altitudes of about 62 miles and give passengers just a few minutes in space and the chance to experience micro-gravity.

Orbital space tourism is when the spacecraft reaches orbit and passengers can spend up to a week orbiting Earth. SpaceX and Space Adventures are the only companies currently offering orbital space tourism.

Who are the key players in space tourism ?

The key players at the forefront of the race to bring space tourism to the masses are Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and SpaceX.

Virgin Galactic was established in 2004 by the British entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson. It launched its first commercial spaceflight in June 2023 for research purposes only and carried three passengers from the Italian Air Force and National Research Council.

The company took its first paying space travelers aboard Galactic O2 on August 10, 2023. The space tourism flight was launched from New Mexico and took three passengers – mother and daughter Keisha Schahaff and Anastasia Mayers, and Jon Goodwin, an 80-year-old former Olympian – to the edge of space and back, reaching an apex point of 55 miles above Earth and lasting a total of 72 minutes.

Virgin Galactic now offers a monthly cadence of spaceflights, asserting itself as a major player in space tourism. Each flight can accommodate three paying passengers, along with an accompanying astronaut.

Aerospace company Blue Origin was founded by American billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2000. Bezos traveled to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket in 2021, describing the experience as the “best day ever.” His journey into space lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds and was Blue Origin’s first crewed flight. The flight also took aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the youngest space traveler.

SpaceX is owned by billionaire Elon Musk and was founded in 2002. In 2021, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the first orbital class rocket capable of re-flight, successfully took four passengers into orbit – 363 miles above Earth. A year later, the company, in conjunction with Axiom Space, took four passengers to the International Space Station, where they spent more than a week. According to reports, the passengers paid US$55m each for the trip.

SpaceX is the only space tourism company to send private civilians into orbit and to the International Space Station. To date, the Falcon 9 rocket has undergone 299 launches, 257 landings, and 231 re-flights. SpaceX’s Starship is the world’s most powerful launch system and in the future should be able to carry up to 100 people on long-duration, interplanetary flights.

While space tourism has gained headlines over the past few years as the industry is poised to become more accessible, it has been around for several decades. Indeed, American businessman Dennis Tito was the first space tourist in 2001, visiting the International Space Station while joining two Russian cosmonauts on a supply mission. The trip cost him a reported US$20m.

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How much does a trip to outer space cost?

The cost of space tourism has dramatically decreased since Tito's trip. However, it can vary significantly depending on the type of flight – suborbital or orbital – and on the company.

A Virgin Galactic ticket, for example, costs $450,000; however, even those with the cash to splash will have to join an 800-long waiting list.

Blue Origin does not publicly publish its flight costs. However, according to a space tourist who booked a flight in 2021 aboard Blue Origin, he paid a reported US$28m, although later had to skip the flight due to a “scheduling conflict”.

While the cost of space travel is currently prohibitive except for the world’s wealthiest individuals, there’s no doubt that as technology advances and space tourism companies reach economies of scale, space travel will become more affordable to more people.

What’s next for space tourism ?

Beyond commercial flights becoming more regular and more affordable, space tourism companies are already setting their sights on extended stays in space. In 2018, Orion Span, a galactic experience company, launched plans for an extended stay in a luxury space hotel – the Aurora Station – on the moon. The experience will reportedly set travelers back $9.5m.

Content by The Drum Network member:

antimatter space travel

Relevance is a strategic and creative digital marketing agency specialising in profiling and targeting Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Individuals for the world's most exclusive brands and companies. Our agency has been marketing high-value goods, services, and experiences to this audience for over a decade, successfully driving the world's wealthiest individuals to take action. From niche collaborations to 360° support, we can provide a full-service solution or work on a project-by-project basis. Based in Monaco and the UK, our team of international and multilingual experts excel at building brand identities, delivering cutting-edge websites and creating innovative digital strategies with SEO, paid and social advertising, media buying, social media, influencer marketing, PR, content marketing, and CRM to help our clients grow their businesses. We work with a select portfolio of clients within the ultra-luxury sector, including real estate and hospitality, private travel (yachts, jets and supercars), wellbeing, gastronomy, fashion and apparel, jewellery and accessories, and finance.

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  14. Interstellar travel: From science fiction to reality

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