Space Ships
Imagine waking up one morning on the first day of your family vacation. Everyone goes out to the garage with his or her suitcases to get into the ... space ship! For your vacation you are going to a big resort and amusement park on the moon.

Is this ever going to happen? Will people in the future have space ships like the Millennium Falcon that let them fly off to the moon whenever they feel like it? The quick answer to that question is, "No." It will not happen until we figure out a better way to store and use energy.

Photo courtesy © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. All Digital work by ILM.

The rockets that we have today are nothing like the Millennium Falcon. They are chemical rockets. The Space Shuttle holds millions of pounds of fuel at launch. The fuel provides the energy needed to get the shuttle into orbit 200 miles overhead.

The Saturn V rocket that sent U.S. astronauts to the moon was also a chemical rocket. It was 363 feet tall and weighed 3,000 tons. This would never fit in your garage! Plus it would be hard for the average person to afford it. Or to fill it up -- it carried over 5 million pounds of fuel! Even if the fuel only costs 20 cents a pound, that's $1 million for one trip.

The Force Is Strong There are two cool things that all the Star Wars spaceships have: artificial gravity and inertial damping. If you have ever seen a real astronaut in space, you know that people in space are weightless. In Star Wars, people walk around in every space ship as though they have normal Earth-weight. Chances are that these artificial gravity systems would be made using the same technology as the repulsorlift. Inertial damping is needed to cancel out the effects of acceleration. Even in the crude chemical rockets that we have today, the astronauts experience forces of four Gs or more when the rocket blasts off. The ships in Star Wars accelerate even faster. What is needed is a system that can cancel out the effects of acceleration, turning and deceleration. Artificial gravity fields can handle this as well.

To be able to blast off to the moon from your garage, one thing you need is fuel with a much higher energy density. For example, a pound of highly enriched uranium has enough energy in it to equal about 1,000,000 gallons of gasoline. In other words, approximately all of the energy stored in a Saturn V rocket could fit into two pounds of enriched Uranium. That assumes that you have a good, small reactor to extract the energy from the uranium in a quick, controlled way. Other techniques include nuclear fusion and matter-antimatter annihilation, but it will be years before those are possible.

Photo courtesy © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. All Digital work by ILM.

One last problem involves heat production. In the Star Wars universe, heat apparently is not a problem. But in the real world, nuclear fission and fusion generate lots of waste heat, which you will need to dump somewhere. Dumping heat into space is hard because the vacuum of space makes it the world's biggest thermos. The size of the thermal radiators might prevent your personal spaceship from fitting in the garage.

So it doesn't look good right now. Unless someone invents something like a cheap anti-gravity machine or a way to warp space-time, we will not be flying to the moon in our "cars" any time in the near future.