Going Interstellar (collection)

Dr. Greg Matloff is a leading expert in possibilities for interstellar propulsion. He recently retired from his position as a tenured astronomy professor with the physics department of New York City College of Technology, CUNY. He has served as a consultant for NASA, a Hayden Associate of the American Museum of Natural History, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Greg coauthored with Les Johnson and C Bangs Living Off the Land in Space, the monograph Deep-Space Probes, and he wrote The Starflight Handbook in collaboration with Eugene Mallove (1989). His papers on interstellar travel and methods of protecting Earth from asteroid impacts were published in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Acta Astronautica, Spaceflight, Space Technology, The Journal of Astronautical Sciences, and Mercury. In 1998, he won a $5,000 prize in the international essay contest on Extraterrestrial Intelligence sponsored by the National Institute for Discovery Science.

In this, the first of his two essays for this anthology, Greg explains the fundamental physics of antimatter propulsion. Yes, antimatter is real but its use will be challenging indeed….

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Most readers of this book have heard of antimatter. Because of that fictional engineer Scotty on the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek, most readers know that it is both exceptionally energetic and very difficult to store. Scotty, in fact, spends a great deal of time trying to maintain the stability of the ship’s antimatter “core” and making sure that the stuff does not come in contact with the walls of the core’s containment vessel, which is composed of ordinary matter. If he were to fail in this endeavor, the ship would immediately explode and be visible across the galaxy as a miniature, short-lived supernova.

If you’ve read Dan Brown’s thriller Angels and Demons or seen the Hollywood movie version, you know that this material can be produced in nuclear accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider in the CERN, located on the French-Swiss border. And you know that in the wrong hands, even a tiny quantity of antimatter could be used to commit terrorist acts such as blowing up the Vatican.

But what is this stuff? How do we know about it? Does it exist in nature? How can we produce and store it? And, how effective might it be in propelling an interstellar spacecraft?

Early Antimatter History