There is no direction up and down in space (Project Daedalus)

There is no direction up and down in space (Project Daedalus)

There are some mistakes about the study project Daedalus, and one of them is that the craft must have the same mass of fuel for acceleration and braking, so the stages of Daedalus should be the same size. Or there must be some other thing like a solar sail, which would help the craft to break because the craft needs the same mass of energy for decreasing the speed than in the acceleration stage.

The solar sail can also be used as the giant brake, and it would open before the craft is coming near the Alpha Centauri, and then the particle flow from the star would decrease the speed of Daedalus. That means that it works like a giant airbrake when spacecraft is entering the other solar system. This project is an only theoretical study about the interstellar spacecraft.

When we are thinking Daedalus as the manned craft, we must realize that the floors of the craft can put in the vertical direction to the traveling direction. That means that the craft is moving to the direction, where the roof of the crew could be.

In the 1970s the British Interplanetary society designed many study projects with the interplanetary- and interstellar spacecraft.  Some of those designs were very fantastic, and one of the most remarkable ideas was to create saucer-shape spacecraft, which would use the interstellar ramjet for creating the energy. The system would be interesting, because the craft was short, and it would travel in the space like the larger part would be ahead. The ramjet system would suck the ions through the craft, and then those ions would be targeted with laser rays, which would make fusion possible.

That system would also create artificial gravity by using the speed of the craft for that thing. When the craft is traveling in a vertical direction comparing to the floor, that can create artificial gravity, and the craft is moving to the direction of the roof, as I have written before. 

But when we are thinking about the saucer shape craft we are always forgetting the possibility, that the craft would be a modular system. The rocket stage, where could be even antimatter engines could be a dock to the probe, or manned module, and it can be separated, when the craft would operate in the atmosphere.

There is introduced the conventional version of this solution. The X-37B is the small space shuttle, which has been space over 700 days. The Agena-stage can connect to those shuttles very easily, the docking ring can put in the cargo room, and then the rocket stage can push the craft in the solar system. But where NASA would use those shuttles.

The thing is that they can use those shuttles to collect data from the asteroid belt or deliver probes to the atmospheres of the gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn. When we would want to make something revolutionary, we can equip Agena stages with lightweight nuclear reactors. That allows to use of NERVA-system in those vehicles, but the political resistance against those things would be great.

So is there possible to make extreme powerful rockets without nuclear energy? One version is to use a simple pressure base system, where gas is traveling through the pump, what is connected with dynamo. That thing allows increasing the temperature in the combustion chamber and also the speed of exhaust gas would turn higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus