Antimatter Spacecraft

The Future Antimatter Spacecraft INDEX 1. Index 1 2. Introduction 2 3. What is antimatter? 3 4. Matter-Antimatter Engine 5 5. Last Improvements 7 INTRODUCTION 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 another one of those science fiction technologies, like teleportation and time travel, that have some scientific basis. It just hasn't been achieved yet. However, scientists are working …

…has demonstrated the affordability of antimatter for some near-term propulsion applications. Pennsylvania State University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory continued development of a first generation portable antiproton trap (106 antiprotons), and with MSFC began development of a second-generation high performance antimatter trap, HiPAT, that will have a capacity 100 times greater. By 2002, we plan to capture, store and transport 107 - 108 antiprotons to Marshall Space Flight Centre (MSFC) for the world's first demonstration of matter/antimatter annihilation thrust.