Diamandis: I’m Betting on Beam Propulsion to Make Space Travel Affordable

X PRIZE founder Peter Diamandis says that the cost of getting to orbit could be brought down considerably if you could perfect beamed propulsion, which could be produced relatively cheaply on Earth:

But in the near term, I’m betting on a technology, which is very doable today.  In fact, I’m in the middle of talking with a number of benefactors about creating an X Prize around this concept.  It’s called beamed power propulsion.  And the concept is, today rockets haven’t changed in the last 2,000 years, since early Chinese rocketry.  You have a tube, you burn something inside, and hot gases come out one end.  That’s – they’ve gotten bigger and more expensive and more elaborate, more efficient.  But they’re still the same basic concepts.  So, on of the X Prize ideas I’m excited about that I really want to have is called beam powered propulsion.

The way it works is you have a source of energy on the ground, either lasers or probably microwaves.  And that system is getting more and more efficient every year.  The price to generate a megawatt or a gigawatt of energy is coming down year after year.  We’re learning how to print it, make it more efficient.  And what you do is, you beam the energy to the rocket and the rocket basically converts that energy to heat and heats up a working fluid, like hydrogen, and then the hydrogen goes out the other end.  That can reduce the cost of space flight by 50 to100-fold, and it’s technology that can be done right now.  But no one’s doing it because no one’s doing it.  And that’s where an X Prize really comes in if you can demonstrate something just enough.

Watch the full video at Big Think.