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Highway in space connected by large magnets?
Say we line up a few asteroids, strap them with huge magnets, then slingshot a ship along them...turning the magnets on and off as needed to increase the speed of the ship at each stage. Is this even possible? Its just an idea I had the other day when I seen two magnets snapping together...I wondered what if we could turn one off and move it out of the way before the other one hit... feel free to shoot me down, its not my area of expertise.
If this is possible, what speeds could be achieved if we built not a highway for floating things around our solar system but a runway half the length of the solar system...for interstellar launches, using our most powerful magnets....how many would we need; how far apart would they have to be...the ships speed would come into account here.
Anyway thanks in advance
Yes Adam, I know what you mean. What I should be asking is what kind of magnets would be needed i.e what size/power, what range they have and how do they scale, what the "ship" would have to be made of, where this type of thing could be used etc.
Spot and Fred thanks for your answers but I wont accept "it costs too much" or "asteroids move" as an answer, they are pretty weak excuses to give up.
In 3 days I'll pick a best answer, and post a better question...
3 Answers
- 8 years agoFavorite Answer
The undertaking would be humungous, and the cost would bankrupt the planet. It's easier to use the gravitational pull of the giant gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn etc.,). But even that's no really going to give a spacecraft enough velocity to cut down the length of time it would take to cross interstellar space.
We need a way to jump from one part of space to another. Many ideas have been floated but none that are really credible IMO.
- Adam DLv 78 years ago
Magnetic force drops off pretty quickly with distance. Think about how close you have to get a magnet to a paper clip before it will pick it up - a paper clip is very light, a ship for traveling in space is very massive.
- spot aLv 78 years ago
It is not possible
Asteroids are constantly orbiting, and changing orbits if they pass near each other.
Also, attracting a spaceship to the magnet attached to the asteroid will also attract the asteroid and magnet to the spaceship slightly, changing its orbit. Doing this many hundreds of times could be dangerous.
