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'Acceleration without fuel:' Revolutionary superconducting thruster harnesses Earth's magnetic field in 1st orbital test (www.space.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/space@mander.xyz
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..."Once you have super-conducting technology available in space, you can then create very strong magnetic fields and you can use them for various use cases," he said. "You can accelerate things in space very fast or change the trajectory of a satellite completely without fuel."...

"When we go to space, we get hurt by radiation, and these superconducting magnets can create umbrellas of magnetic fields around the spacecraft to protect the interior," said Arshavsky. "So we can shield people in space from that radiation."...

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[+] -10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

No, keeping parts of things cold in space is easy. As long as something isn't being hit by direct solar radiation then the default temperature is negative several hundred degrees

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Technically yes, due to the extreme distances between particles in space we'd average a volume and say "negative temperature!".

    However.

    Those individual particles are shooting at extreme speed and momentum, so they're individually very hot.

    And due to the lack of particles bouncing around in a given volume of space, you can't use conduction/convection (aka, here fellow particles, take some of my energy). Instead you can only use radiative cooling, which is crazy inefficient. For example, the ISS has 75KW of cooling across 1000 square meters.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    But once it's cool it stays cool. Anything behind a radiation shield will stay cool forever

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Until it turns on. Then boom, waste heat.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago*

    Though in all fairness that isn't much of a problem for a superconductor - no resistance, no waste heat when power runs through it.

    The main problem would be the waste heat from the rest of the system rather than the superconductor itself, so maintaining a superconductor cool is more a thermal insulation problem and the near vacuum of space actually helps in doing it because it removes the heat transmission from the hotter parts of the system to the superconductor via the environment (though, of course, it still happens via the solid parts in contact with it, so the thermal insulation is needed there)

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