Call Of The Cosmic Wild. Relativistic Rockets For The New Millennium. 2nd Expanded Edition.

by James Essig

Overview

This book provides a broad treatment of relativistic rocket systems.

Accordingly, many methods of relativistic rocket flight are presented with theoretical evidence of plausibility.

Naturally, the proposed methods are merely theoretical. However, the physics and mathematics for enabling the conjectured systems is already largely established.

The content of this books is provided in various levels of mathematics ranging from rather simple arithmetic to advanced formulas of both closed form and numerical approximations.

A major focus of the content includes applications of nuclear energy for relativistic rocket flight. As such nuclear fission and nuclear fusion powered propulsion systems are explained in rather detailed manners. Unlike many of the similar works of other authors, Essig provides detailed analysis of nuclear powered spacecraft that may achieve very large Lorentz factors.

Additionally, much conjecture is provided for matter-antimatter powered rockets as well as rockets that carry safely stored antimatter but extract the normal matter reactants from the background in natural and/or artificially disposed forms. In some scenarios, drag energy is assumed largely captured and recycled to enable effective specific impulse values of matter-antimatter engine exhaust approaching twice the speed of light. What is more interesting is descriptions of plausible systems for which arbitrarily greater yet specific impulse values may be obtained.

In addition to propulsion, much content is provided on methods of shielding highly relativistic spacecraft from gas, dust, and other debris as well as methods of sinking drag heat as exhaust embodied thermal energy.

Exotic materials are proposed in a somewhat ad hoc manner but then so with mathematical and physical arguments suggesting the various degrees of these materials refractory, reflective, and mechanical strength properties as well as volumetric densities of these material.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781987008869
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	11/09/2018
Pages:	796
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.58(d)

About the Author

James Essig’s love of interstellar travel had its genesis in his childhood. Through most of his elementary school-age years, he was a shy kid, but found the school curriculum often boring and often neglected his school work to read on his own. He had a very personal dream, however, that motivated him to get through the often boring school days. This dream is that for an unbounded future of human interstellar space-flight.


His infatuation with manned space exploration began early in grade school, fueled by the Apollo Space program and lunar landings and the promise of manned missions to distant planets in the not-so-distant future. It seemed as though, by the 1980s, we would definitely be sending humans on Martian exploratory missions. His interest in manned space travel waned a bit during the late 1970s through the mid-1990s but picked up again after he had read a book on real-world potential interstellar travel methods based mainly on known and well-established physics.

Mr. Essig holds a degree in physics from George Mason University.