Physics and Propulsion

IWhy

How far you can go is part of how free you are. For most of history the edge of the world was the edge of the map. Today it is the edge of the rocket.

A chemical rocket is almost all propellant. Most of the fuel exists to carry the rest of the fuel. That arithmetic sets a hard ceiling on where we can go and what we can bring. Anything beyond the nearest planets, at any useful speed, needs a different physics of motion: more push from less mass, over a longer time.

The ideas exist. Electric thrusters already fly. Nuclear thermal engines were tested on the ground decades ago. Sails pushed by sunlight have flown. Beyond those lie concepts that are honest but unproven, and beyond those, claims that do not survive measurement. Sorting the three is slow, careful work, and most of it is reading. That is a kind of work a small group can do well.

IIWhat we are building toward

A clear, open account of how things can move through space, sorted by evidence: what has flown, what has been tested on a bench, what exists only in papers, and what has been tried and failed.

A bench. Propulsion physics is cheap to read and expensive to test, but some of it can be tested small. A thrust balance that can resolve very small forces, a vacuum chamber, and a calorimeter are enough to check many claims. We are designing that bench so that its drawings and its data can be published.

Simulation we can share. Models of thrusters and trajectories, with the code, so that anyone can run the same case and check the same number.

IIIPrinciples

Established physics first. We do not skip to the exotic. A program that cannot explain an ion thruster has no business speculating about a warp drive.

Ordinary measurements for extraordinary claims. A thrust balance, a repeat, and a second person reading the same trace.

Publish nulls. A device that produces no thrust is a result, and often the more useful one.

Mark the line. Every document says plainly where established physics ends and our guessing begins.

Stay safe and legal. We do not handle radioactive material. Concepts that need it are studied on paper and in simulation only.

IVCurrent work

The program is at the reading stage. We are building an annotated survey of propulsion methods, organized by the strength of the evidence behind each one. We are drafting the design of a small thrust-measurement stand and the list of claims it could check. We are choosing the first simulation cases to publish with code.

No hardware has been built yet. The survey will be published as it matures, and each section will say what it rests on.

VHow to take part

If you can read a physics paper and tell us where our reasoning is thin, say so. The public channel for every pillar is github.com/AEON-7; open an issue there.

If you have built a thrust balance or run a vacuum chamber, we would like your notes.

Sign in to the Forge to follow the survey as it is written.