How Far is Wayne Planning to Go Next Marathon?

For those wondering how far Wayne wants to go on the next marathon....

.....click here

 

HAH! Great job.

 

I was wondering about hypermiling the USS Enterprise. How many light years can you go on a tank of deuterium?

 

For that mission you know Picard would be better than Kirk.





Scotty: ...but Captain, she'll blow, if this keeps up...
Kirk: MORE!!!

Ever more deafening hum....

 

You should be able to raise your high end pulse and have a very long high speed glide.

BTW. Who wants to do me a favor and figure out the MPG of a rocket to the moon and back?

 

When it gets about 500 miles above Earth (i.e. reaches escape velocity), the FE is about infinity.

 

right. so, how much fuel us used?

 

I ran around the internet looking for numbers, and came up with 750,000mi travelled by the Apollo 11 astronauts and a total propellant capacity of 7.24 million pounds. If you figure that all the propellant was liquid hydrogen and oxygen (not true, but makes for a simpler analysis) then you end up with ~850,000lb of liquid hydrogen, which takes up about 1.5 million gallons. That comes out to about 0.5mpg, not including the oxidizer. If you want, you can figure it in terms of GGE by accounting for low energy density of liquid hydrogen vs. gasoline. That gets you about 2MPGGE. So space travel on a Saturn V is kind of like driving a H2 at 50mph through ankle-deep water.

 

Maybe it would get better on a trip to Mars....

 

Maybe someone should post this question to slashdot and of course make a link back to this site