New Horizons: Pluto and Beyond
- Thread starter Bozo Erectus
- Start date
Perfection
The Great Head.
I don't think it's that infeasible. We've quite a bit of experience with multi-decade components. Oversizing components, extreme life-cycle testing, and redundancy, I should think would be able to reduce risk sufficiently.
Solid state electronics can be pretty robust.
Solid state electronics can be pretty robust.
We're probably better off investing our money and energy in better propulsion rather than sending any sort of multi-generational science probe beyond the heliosphere. (Other than one way time-capsule type devices, or von neumann probes...)
In 100 years maybe we could have ramscoop drives, or nuclear pulse propulsion drives (we could actually build these right now), or something else that can get out to 550 AU in a few weeks/months/years, depending on how fast they can accelerate to some respectable % of c.
I believe the FOCAL missions are talking about something getting there in 50 years, which to me is still too long. That's not to say I'd heartily endorse someone actually sending something like this out... but as a betting man I'd wager that if we are actually still around in 50 or so years in a state to digest the information it sends back, by then we would be on our way to developing propulsion systems that could get us out to the same distance in a tiny fraction of the time.
In 100 years maybe we could have ramscoop drives, or nuclear pulse propulsion drives (we could actually build these right now), or something else that can get out to 550 AU in a few weeks/months/years, depending on how fast they can accelerate to some respectable % of c.
I believe the FOCAL missions are talking about something getting there in 50 years, which to me is still too long. That's not to say I'd heartily endorse someone actually sending something like this out... but as a betting man I'd wager that if we are actually still around in 50 or so years in a state to digest the information it sends back, by then we would be on our way to developing propulsion systems that could get us out to the same distance in a tiny fraction of the time.
