And how would the vessel slow down?
There are lots of questions still to be answered of course, like what happens when a vehicle at near light-speed hits a tiny meteorite.
This is the only viable technology for rapid transport around our solar system and eventually out towards the stars. To that end, the vision must encompass a web of beamers around our system for directed acceleration and braking for a multiplicity of routes. We will weave a transportation web over our solar system made of light. What a wonderful vision that is.
But we are absolutely going to need cheap launches to make it work such that we are lofting tons of equipment into space for deployment of this beamer web. Reusable rockets take us partway towards that goal, but the real cost savers are fully reusable technologies like StarTram and Skylon. We should be building StarTrams right now if we are serious about launching our dreams. With cheap launches we can get heavy equipment onto the Moon and Mars and take serious first steps at establishing permanent presences there.
Assuming for one second that the mirrors could confine the photons and produce that much thrust without burning up:
1)The resource "vehicle" would have to be based on the moon to absorb the recoil.
2) The trapped photons would be red shifted more at each bounce due to the relative velocity; eventually passing out of the useful band of the gain medium and probably frying the system as it descends beyond infra red.
Assuming for one second that the mirrors could confine the photons and produce that much thrust without burning up:
1)The resource "vehicle" would have to be based on the moon to absorb the recoil.
2) The trapped photons would be red shifted more at each bounce due to the relative velocity; eventually passing out of the useful band of the gain medium and probably frying the system as it descends beyond infra red.
DaveB
Feb 24, 2016