
Positron Dynamics is building an antimatter rocket - sandebert
http://www.positrondynamics.com/
======
gus_massa
> _Antimatter is the most energy dense material in the universe._

> _Our core innovation is the ability to generate intense beams of cold
> positrons using proprietary array moderators combined with compact
> radioisotope sources of positrons._

If the "fuel tank" is full of positrons or antimatter, then it's true that it
"is the most energy dense material in the universe".

But IIUC their "fuel tank" has only some radioactive isotope. So the total
weight is the weight of the whole atoms that is 1000x or 10000x or 100000x
bigger than the weight of the positron, so the weight efficiency is not real
(or at least misleading).

If they build this, it will be a nuclear rocket, that has something similar to
a nuclear reactor to produce energy. Not an antimatter rocket. It can
theoretically be more efficient than a usual chemical rocket, but I'll wait to
see the details of the design...

Also from one of the links: [https://medium.com/dissected-by-
propel-x/positron-dynamics-p...](https://medium.com/dissected-by-
propel-x/positron-dynamics-paves-the-road-to-the-final-frontier-d00e60133b67)

> [...] _diverting, or directing, the trapped energy from the annihilation
> process to propel the rocket. To achieve this, Weed, CEO of Positron
> Dynamics, and his team use fusion reactions to transfer the kinetic energy
> of the gamma-ray producing positron beam into charged particles._ [...]

I still can't image how they can use fusion reactions here, or a sensible
explanation of a real process that can be misinterpreted and "translated" in
the press article to "fusion". This is beyond the bullshit threshold.

------
QAPereo
Scam or joke? I can’t tell.

Seriously, they seem to be more or less claiming to take the basics of a PET
scanner, magically cross that with a nuclear reactor, which will somehow
produce fusion at some point, and turn that into a _drive_!

It's definitely bullshit, but is it a joke? It feels a bit like a send-up of
those endless ICO whitepaper+splash page combos. Or wait... is it going to be
an ICO?

