What if we want to catch up to Voyager 1 

Your voice is so perfect for narrations. another great video.

this calls for a warp drive

Look up Project Lyra, the plan to send a probe to ʻOumuamua. That rock is traveling at almost twice the velocity of Voyager 1, but the probe could have gotten there in just 5 to 10 years. It involves sending the probe first to a reverse slingshot around Jupiter so it falls toward the sun. Then, as it flies within a few solar radii of the sun, it fires its engines again, taking advantage of the Oberth Effect to accelerate to over 250 km/s. Entirely doable with current technology.

I see no practical use for this. Time well spent.

Disappointed that gravity assists weren't mentioned... You need to ask yourself "how did we get Voyager 1 to go so fast with tech from 50 years ago?" The answer is that we used gravity assists to multiple the ship's velocity multiple times

1:17 :( I was expecting to hear Subject Zero here... Thanks for the video

I miss the snarky little robot! Love the content, always something interesting to ponder. :) Keep up the good work

The plasma magnet is also an option, apparently it can reach insane speeds theoretically like 1 year to flyby Pluto so couple years to flyby Voyager 1

Others have pointed out the gravity assist possibilities. Granted, this is just a quick look, but w/o grav assist, we need to carry 4x the fuel for the outbound journey. One to get going. One to cancel our velocity. One to burn back to Earth. One to cancel that velocity. All of this increases the mass of the ship, which affects the rocket equation and makes things more difficult. You must take the fuel to accelerate the fuel you need for all the other burns. It's a vicious loop. Even the presented gaseous core is likely insufficient.

Don't forget you need enough fuel to slow down once you reach it, and then accelerate the ship and Voyager back to earth, and then have enough fuel to slow down AGAIN!

Again GREAT!

You wouldn’t get good thrust but I love the nuclear equivalent of ion engines: the Fission Fragment Rocket Engine. It’s really counterintuitive to not try and capture the energy of the products, but shooting a roughly 100 amu product out the back at like 50 MeV (and catching the other product going towards the ship) gives you *Half a Million* isp!

It’s great that this came right after they received a signal from the Voyager-1

I hope maybe oneday will get the technology to go and find voyagers again and being them back

Hey subject zero hope yo'u read this theirs a vid by Dr ben mile's who did that vid on force field of radiation protection i think you give it a look and it could be amazing if you did a vid on the technology for future active radiation protection from space but also if you could dig into other tech and such to find that out

With gravity assist and a pulse nuclear propulsion engine, this could be achieved with way less resources involved at fractions of the speed of light using only currently proven technology.

The answer becomes how to skip a light year? Don't try Only energy can do that.... That's your soul at somepoint in time... I won't stop you. But this is one hell of a warning

Need a ftl drive of sorts. Would be cool to go grab in and bring it back to the Smithsonian

another great video, b.t.w. I wouldn't have the patience to figure the math, thank you for giving us the conclusions, that was very interesting!

I love this but all I was saying while watching it it is why a 240t ship voyager 1 was not even a ton

So by basic conclusion, we might as well wait till fusion reactors work before trying to catch up? Those can get some what reasonable thrust levels still at very high engine exhaust velocities after all. And unlike the molten and gaseous core reactor designs are getting actual serious amounts of money put in to them. Meaning they'll probably be available well before those two fission designs are ever completed. To clarify further why I think so, it is not necessary to develop a fusion system capable of commercially viable energy production for a rocket. The real goal is instead just to be able to get access to the extra temperatures and thus exhaust velocity that a fusion reactor can produce. If the reactor itself just has a more modest energy return, enough to run itself and power the ship, not to run entire cities, then it would be already good enough for use as a very capable engine. And such a goal is far easier to achieve relatively soon, even now various test units with more modest power returns goals are in the works after all. (ie 10 power returned for every 1 put in, rather then the 100+ thought needed for commercially viable reactors) As such, I think a fusion drive will probably be available before more advanced fission engines.

You really gotta do a video on Xenon, Argon, and Lithium engines at some point.

For asteroid defense, raw power and ISP are needed. Slingshots might be of limited usefulness to defend Earth from such threats, especially without sufficiently advanced knowledge of the threat.

Sad nuclear pulsed propulsion wasn't mentioned.

How about solar sails? Can't they propel a starship to very high speeds, requiring no internal fuel? Or are they still just theoretical?

So, with the last engine thingmajig it could be a couple of days. Strap a pilot, an engineer and Bob and we can grab that thing that is trying to escape this hell system.

The Voyagers will almost certainly be retrieved some day for their cultural significance but since this would always be an incredibly low priority mission, it probably won't happen until we are so advanced that at least local solar system travel becomes something trivial ! Doubt anyone is gonna go after the Voyagers before we routinely can travel 10-20% light speed.

You don’t just have to catch up. You also have to decelerate to Voyager’s speed if you want to capture it. Also, are the calculations taking into account the mass of the fuel itself?

There are already quite a few ion engines that reach exhaust velocities of over ~70,000 m/s. The limiting factor is not fuel space or materials, it is thrust which is very low so it takes a long time to accelarate the spacecraft. As an example most ion engines take many months to reach geostationary orbit which is ~35,000 km away from earth not billions. Thats what is propotional to the time we need to get to voyager 1 not exhaust velocity. Also, gravitational assists are the reason voager 1 and 2 were launched and relied on which was not mentioned on this video. Try to have better research next time in technical subjects.

In other words, you need Warp Drive

And then slow down to grab it safely, and then slow down and accelerate back to earth, and then slow down to de orbit and land with an intact Voyager probe… 😢

🙏 👍👍

We need Nuclear Saltwater engines today!

Well lets go do it then 😆

Hey, subject zero, thanks for rea'ding my com, man! I hope you can do a vid on active radiation and passive radiation protection technologies for space travel. Dr. Ben Miles is a great YTber. I hope you'll love the vid i recommended you to wa'tch from him!

it is not really a matter if we can reach it, given a little time we'll eventually get the tech for it the question is if we should I say *hell yea!!!* sending our address to aliens was such a stuuuuuupid idea! people often think if they can do something, not if they should

How do these engines compare to today's ion thrusters?

Captain Kirk will find it in about 500 years. no wait that was voyager 6, which was never launched

I don't know where you got the idea that gas core nuclear rocket can have a SI of 67,000s. According to a paper by the American Nuclear Society (from which your graphic comes) their SI is about 6000s. Also extremely high SI engines accelerate quite slowly which would change the time to reach Voyager considerably.

This reminds me of the time I lost my keys

Do a sun slingshot and enter time warp !

I love this channel 🎉

Sad to see how many fewer views this channel gets these days :(

Voyager 1 is as real as the Easter bunny.

The space industry as a whole need to stop playing around and start testing this technologies, this has a lot of terrestrial use cases.

Only 8pp views so far is crazy

Would love to see you do a video about the different nuclear engine technologies, their feasibility, and how far off we are from making them a reality.

Why bother? It’s right there, in the sky….

discuss not discus

前排！

I have a proposal, that according to the basics of Newton's laws of motion, and the conventional concept of a vacuum of space, wouldn't it be a fact that once broken free of Earth's gravity, a spaceship in motion should remain in motion, unless acted upon by another force? In other words, once you've reached escape velocity at acceleration, you could turn off the thrusters and continue accelerating indefinitely, until reaching terminal velocity which would be the speed of light. The problem however, is that although a vacuum offers no friction or resistance, neither will it allow you to steer or slow down. And nor will it permit heat displacement, so eventually even your own body-heat would cook you. Any form of heat-derived thrust would cook you. Light from stars or suns would cook you. A vacuum is in fact the perfect insulator, that's what makes the vacuum-flask such a popular method to store hot or cold liquids in for prolonged periods of time. There would be no heat in space, therefore absolute freezing, yet no means by which to displace your own heat, which leaves no option but to freeze or burn up. I think this is why humans are forever destined to live here on our beautiful Stationary Planar Earth, and leave the dreams and fantasies of space-travel to the imaginary realms of childhood dreams and fantasies.

First in? Woop🎉

i didnt like the flashing ... its painful to watch