GETTY X3, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2, NASA, BLUE ORIGIN, WIKIPEDIA
Solar sails
We might one day
sail around the solar
system. Huge
canopies could
catch the solar wind- the stream of
charged particles
blowing from the
sun. The technology
has been
demonstrated in
miniature, and The
Planetary Society’s
LightSail 2 mission,
with 32m^2 of sails,
launched in
November 2018.
Antimatter rockets
When a particle
meets its antimatter
equivalent, they
annihilate into
energy, which could
power a rocket. Just
10g of antimatter
could get you to
Mars in four weeks!
But it’s not cheap to
make: if CERN’s
particle accelerators
exclusively made
antimatter for a
year, they’d create
just a billionth of
a gram.Alcubierre drive
Move over Star Trek,
this is a warp drive
for the real world.
NASA is looking at
manipulating space
itself, so that you
could travel faster
than the speed of
light without
violating the rules of
physics. The catch
is you’d need to
have negative mass
in order to do so,
and we don’t yet
know if that’s
possible.Space elevators
If you could slowly
climb an elevator
shaft that was
anchored to the
equator, Ear th’s
rotation means that
at the top you’d be
orbiting the planet
fast enough to fly off
into space. While
still a long way off,
thanks to recent
advances in
materials science
we may soon have
something to build
the cable from.Fill up en route
Rather than taking all
their fuel with them,
future missions
could harvest
methane – the main
component of natural
gas – from places
like Mars, Jupiter
and Saturn’s largest
moon, Titan. In 2017,
Jeff Bezos’s space
company Blue Origin
successfully
test-fired its BE-4
rocket engine, which
is powered by
liquefied natural gas.HOW WE’LL GET AROUND
LEFT: Future space
colonies could mine
asteroids for vital
resources.RIGHT: Near-Earth
asteroids are rich in
valuable minerals –
and in ice.