Lyons Leadership

Beamed Energy Propulsion or, in brief, BEP, is a part of rocket science. However, you dont need to be a rocket scientist to get its idea, it is very simple, and I will explain it to you in the next several paragraphs.

It is all about rockets. What everyone knows about them? On Earth motion is based on pushing from the medium, wherever the motion takes places: cars pushing from pavement by wheels, swimmers pushing from water by limbs, etc. Rockets fly in space and space is mostly a vacuum, it is empty. Rockets move in space using reactive principle, i.e. exhausting hot gases (backward) and pushing away from exhaust in opposite direction (forward). Rockets have to carry all their fuel and burning agent onboard, because there is nothing in space that can be used for burning fuel (like air for burning gasoline in automobiles on earth).

With everything needed for reactive motion stuffed onboard, rockets have very little room for cargo, and this room gets very expensive. Literally, the major loads that rockets are carrying are their engines and fuel. If one could find a way to provide energy for rocket motion from outside, there will be no need to carry all that heavy parts: like oxidizer, cryogenics, tanks, lines, etc., and the gain in rocket efficiency will be enormous!

Energy can be delivered to the rocket from remote external source using light or, say, laser, x-ray, microwave high-power beams. With its mirrors, rocket will collect and focus that beams on its “fuel”. Any solid matter can be a fuel. When high-power beam of photons is focused on a solid material, the material evaporates and ionizes instantaneously. The energy density in focused high-power beam exceeds hundreds to millions times one in the heat of burning hydrogen. Thus, beam-driven rocket will remain a rocket, it will be pushing from its own exhaust, but the energy of this exhaust is much higher, and the rocket itself is much lighter, comparing to hydrogen burners.

Payload, Propellant, Photons, Period! ” 4P Principle introduced by Arthur Kantrowitz, the founder of modern laser propulsion, is an essence of BEP. Laser-driven rockets will consist of lightweight focusing optics (mirrors), modest amount of solid ablative propellant and the rest: the rest will be payload! No more fuel, cryogenics, tanks, oxygen, combustion chambers, etc.

So, what is efficiency gain of beam-driven rocket vs. hydrogen burning rocket? Hydrogen burners cost us $10,000 per pound of a payload delivered to low earth orbit. Scientifically-proven calculations have shown that the price of space delivery per pound drops to minute $100 for laser-driven rockets: a hundredfold, revolutionary change in cost!

The most developed today branch of BEP is called laser propulsion, it is based on energy transfer with high-power laser beams. The next in development is microwave propulsion, followed by barely explored BEP with x-rays and particles. The number of in-lab demonstrations of BEP grows every year, and the time of actual demonstration of beam-driven space rocket is getting closer. No question, there is still a lot of work ahead on development of BEP systems, but one thing is clear, they have a great future.