Improved Travel Technologies
Several technologies have been proposed which both save fuel and provide significantly faster travel than Hohmann transfers. Most are still just theoretical, but the Deep Space 1 mission was a very successful test of an ion drive. These improved technologies focus on one or more of:
- Space propulsion systems with much better fuel economy. Such systems would make it possible to travel much faster while keeping the fuel cost within acceptable limits.
- Using solar energy and in-situ resource utilization to avoid or minimize the expensive task of shipping components and fuel up from the Earth's surface, against the Earth's gravity (see "Using non-terrestrial resources", below).
Besides making travel faster, such improvements would allow greater design "safety margins" by reducing the imperative to make spacecraft lighter.
Read more about this topic: Interplanetary Spaceflight
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)