Black Hole spacedrive

To the stars! [Link]

Crane and Westmoreland’s paper on using Hawking radiation for this purpose has been kicking around on the Net for a bit, never quite making it to the top of the queue here, but Marcus Chown gives it a good look in the latest New Scientist, so let’s pause to examine it now. Rather than finding a nearby black hole, the two suggest using a gamma ray laser powered by solar energy to create one. The energy needed would be enormous, calling for solar panels 250 kilometers across in close solar orbit, a Robert Forward-esque engineering challenge.

Image: An artist’s impression of a black hole. Credit: Jörn Wilms (Tübingen) et al/ESA.

But if you could create such solar panels and let them soak up the needed sunlight to power up your black hole production facility, you’d wind up with something tiny that offered tremendous power. Says Chown:

The resulting million-tonne black hole would be about the size of an atomic nucleus. The next step would be to manoeuvre it into the focal range of a parabolic mirror attached to the back of the crew quarters of a starship. Hawking radiation consists of all sorts of species of subatomic particles, but the most common will be gamma ray photons. Collimated into a parallel beam by the parabolic mirror, these would be the starship’s exhaust and would push it forward.