Photonic Laser Thruster Demonstrated

I am literally salivating at this science. Earth to Mars in ONE WEEK? Incredible, fantasy, crazy, possible. All things I feel could be used to describe the scenario. Nonetheless, the fact that he has demonstrated a prototype is very promising, and the capacity for scaling up lasers has been shown to be relatively easy; the big problem is usually issues involving focusing said lasers at high power over distances because of the air heating up so much and refracting the beam. This, of course, is not even an issue for propulsion systems of this sort, so I think the long and short is that we could very well have a producible high-yield propulsion system in place for spacecraft in 5-10 years.

Again, actually drooling on myself right now in anticipation. It’s a little sad.