Enzmann Echolance: Reach For The Stars

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Immerse yourself in a trailblazing revelation – The Enzmann Echolance is here to redefine space travel! I imagine it was Dyson’s starship that fired the imagination of Robert Duncan-Enzmann, then at Raytheon Corporation, leading to a modified and extended Orion that Stine would use in his article. Reading the material in the Archive results in greater perspective on most any subject, not the least of which is Cosmology. Doc E kept silent for over 40 years, although he was able to publish descriptions of vastly less efficient but nevertheless workable interstellar drives in those years.

One failed about a year ago and was shut off, and NASA scientists announced Wednesday, May 15, that a second wheel was no longer operating and that Kepler had paused operations. Kepler carries a photometer, not a camera, that looks at the brightness of stars, and so its optics deliberately defocus light from stars to create a nice spread of light on the detector, which is not ideal for spotting asteroids. Having reviewed what is known about the engineering concept from the literature, and under the assumption it is constructed by an advanced interstellar society with sufficient space infrastructure, the authors of this paper conclude that the Enzmann Starship would work in theory. The Enzmann vessel is distinctive, as the illustration below shows, a long cylinder capped by a 1000-foot sphere made up of 12 million tons of frozen deuterium, the fuel for its eight Orion-style propulsion modules. Because Stine thought in terms of ships traveling together, his ultimate expedition would be about the size of a small city of 20,000 or so dispersed through ten starships.

As a member of the team that built the Atlas, the first ICBM, he was at the forefront of the space race. But IIRC, the 2,xxx planet “candidates” cannot be confirmed by Kepler…it can’t distinguish those from an in-line eclipsing binary. What’s important is that most of the candidates are too faint for atmospheric characterization or for mass (and thus density) determinations (except for masses that can be determined (well) for some multiple systems from transit timing variations and for fewer systems from ellipsoidal variations and doppler boosting (not so well for these techniques)). The other scheme, and this has never been tried, involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability. Nuclear pulse propulsion would detonate a fission bomb behind the vehicle to drive it forward, using enormous shock absorbers to cushion the craft.

A common feature was that the crew area was replicated 3 times for redundancy, and a common core pillar ran the length of the spacecraft and through the center of each habitation unit. As for scaling down, if you ever manage to read the original essay by Stine, he was proposing one stage of the initial probes to have small payloads – but to reach the speeds he wanted, the mass ratio was +1,000.The mechanical strength of deuterium is very low – it’s like warm butter – so it need to be enclosed, not “netted” or wrapped in “mesh”. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. Naturally, some people aren’t ever going to come back to Earth again, but things like that seldom stop motivated people. Reaction Wheel Assemblies are the most crucial but have the lowest reliability of any hardware on a space telescope due to their continuous operation. The Echolance not only promises to extend our lifespans but also offers a first-class seat to the greatest cosmic light show in the universe.

My concern now is who made the RWAs and if they also made the RWAs for IRIS [my last program at LM ] which launches in late June.

With a little luck and a lot of scientific breakthroughs, we might just find ourselves gallivanting between galaxies, sipping on cosmic cocktails, and laughing in the face of Father Time. What I’m doing here is looking at Stine’s use of Enzmann as reflected in his Analog article, in which he foresees fleets of Enzmann starships dispatched in a regular pattern of interstellar exploration. Kepler has, so far, detected more than 2,700 candidate exoplanets orbiting distant stars, including many Earth-size planets that are within their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form. I see Bob Enzmann's work as being one of the few things that the public can latch onto that will enable everyone to have a greater vision of humanity, a greater chance of survival for humanity, and something that will truly begin to lift us up and become an advanced civilization.