/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14817893
>Why not use helium as a rocket fuel?
its being worked on
>Metastable substances are materials that exist in a long-lived excited molecular state. Metastable Helium is one such substance, comprised of a Helium atom with two electrons, one in the first orbital level and one in the second orbital level. The electrons have parallel spin properties. The molecule is balanced on a knife's edge of quantum forces. The electrons want to enter into the ground state (where both electrons occupy the first orbital level) but are forbidden because of the forces acting upon them from their locked spin states. The atom can remain in this state for a mean time of 2.3 hours, but just a small input of energy (from jostling, molecule formation, electromagnetic forces, etc.) will send it over the edge into its ground state, resulting in a large release of energy, about 114 kilocalories per gram, or roughly twice the energy of the most powerful conventional chemical fuel, atomic hydrogen.
>Research is being conducted to see if metastable helium can be formed into a room-temperature solid if bonded with diatomic helium molecules, made from one ground state atom and one excited state atom. This solid, called Helium-IV-A, can in turn be used as a solid rocket propellant. Simply heating the fuel is enough to release the energy, so an oxidizer is not needed. These rockets would produce a specific impulse of about 2200 seconds—compared to the 450-second specific impulse for modern liquid hydrogen-oxygen rockets—and would have enormous thrust capabilities, on the order of 31,000 meters per second, matching types of proposed plasma and fusion rockets.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050520084733/http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20041115/orbitalodd-a.shtml

>>14766074
>>14766076
t. h8rs who will never reach the speculative motive physics zone

>>14726155
>not obviously applicable to a hyperdrive.
its a chink in the armour and knowledge of it is a good way to style on lesser physics autists

>tetraneutrons are real
what are the spaceflight applications?