Jellyfish Drive

Later at the party, in a quiet corner, John, Allen, and Carl starting talking.

John smiled. “Now what Carl? I know you got something else up your sleeve.”

Allen smiled. “You didn’t tell him, did you Carl?”

Carl smiled. “That would have ruined it. Think of it as payback for all the grief he has given me all of my life.”

Allen looked at John and said, “Code Name: Star Drive.”

John looked surprised and puzzled. “Ok, I’ll bite. What is Code Name: Star Drive? What else has Carl dreamed up? That mind of his just doesn’t quit.”

“Code Name: Star Drive is an electro-mechanical space thruster using jellyfish technology for pushing probes around the solar system.

“What? Carl… when did you cook this up?”

Carl replied quietly, “While I was at the aquarium.”

John was stunned, then he shook his head in disbelief. Allen just smiled and laughed.

“What does the aquarium and star drives have to do with other?”

“Oh, the aquarium is just another place to steal great ideas from the Master Designer.”

“Oh, so you are going to launch a porpoise into space. Flipper goes to Mars or something like that.” John said.

Carl responded, “No, actually I said jellyfish technology.”

John looked at him blankly. Allen busted out laughing.

“Let me explain,” said Carl. “Put on your science thinking cap. This may be difficult to comprehend.”

“How does a jellyfish move through the water? Slowly I might add. It sucks in a mass of water into its body and then, using its muscles, it squeezes it out forming a jet. The jet propels the jellyfish through the water. Again, very slowly. It is simply an organic pulse jet.

“Go back to your science class. Force equals mass times acceleration. The jellyfish is moving the same mass, but the acceleration rates are different, so it moves through the water because of the difference. Slow intake and very fast exhaust. It has been working for thousands of years.

“Now the question is, how do I cook up a machine to copy the function of the jellyfish. The answer was my car.”

John continued looking puzzled.

Allen kept quietly laughing and then he said, “You are going to love this.”

Carl continued, “I was working on the air conditioning on my car and a fitting came loose on the high side of the A/C system. Actually, I’m bad. I didn’t tighten the fitting properly. Anyway, the liquid refrigerant came spewing out and as soon as the pressure dropped to atmospheric, the refrigerant turned to vapor and lost all of its velocity. All of liquid turned to gas, as it should have.

“Bing, the light bulb went on above my head and there you have it.”

“Have what?” asked John.

“Space thruster or star drive.”

“OK, you lost me.”

“Ok, we build a machine, a long tubular unit with separate compartments. We add solar panels or a nuclear pile to provide electricity.”

John still wasn’t connecting the pieces of the vision.

“Here is how it works. At the front of the tube is a large bottle of liquid refrigerant. It feeds though an electrically powered valve into a nozzle. The nozzle sprays the liquid refrigerant into a very low-pressure capture bottle at back end of the tubular unit.

“The liquid refrigerant is the mass accelerating through the nozzle providing propulsion. Not a lot of propulsion, but it is repeated constantly in pulses as long as there is electricity.

“The liquid refrigerant sprays into the capture bottle which is at low pressure. The refrigerant instantly boils and changes phase. It also decelerates into a fog. The pressure will increase in the capture bottle until the liquid refrigerant in the liquid bottle is exhausted. Now the valve closes, and the scavenging pump starts. The scavenging pump is powered by onboard batteries which are charged by solar panels or the nuclear pile. The scavenging pump sucks up the vapor and sends it to the pressure pump, and it pressurizes it back into a liquid state and it goes to the liquid pressure bottle to begin the entire process over again. We now have a pulse jet just like the jellyfish. A fixed mass, moving at two acceleration rates and the net difference between them provides propulsion. Simple.

“Of course, the advantage in space is there is no hydrodynamic drag to slow the probe. Every pulse provides a small amount of acceleration which is cumulative, so the probe is constantly accelerating. So instead of coasting across the vast distances of space, it is always accelerating, and we get to our destination sooner.”

“You figured this out at the aquarium?” said John.

“Well, I couldn’t figure out a spacesuit for Flipper. Look John, the Jellyfish Drive project is next. Want to help put it into space?”

Copyright © 2024 Brian Oslin