5 Idiotic Space Travel Ideas (That Might Actually Work)

5 The Gigantic Space Cannon

Gerald Bull was a physics genius, and without a doubt the greatest weapons designer that Canada has ever produced, which may very well be impressive for all we know of Canadian weapon designers. Bull's line of work was a field called "super-artillery", which is a military term meaning "huge fucking cannons."

One of his crowning achievements was the G5 Howitzer, which could launch a shell 30 miles. Being the sort of person who gets a Physics PhD and goes into the field of "giant gun design," Bull decided 30 miles was fucking embarrassing.

So he went to work with the American government in the High Altitude Research Project, where he pointed other gigantic guns directly up into the sky and fired objects up to 60 miles high. You know the Stratosphere? Bull shot through that shit, sending projectiles into something called the Mesosphere. But that wasn't enough. His dream was to build a cannon so big it could shoot a satellite into orbit. After all, isn't that how they'd do it in a cartoon?

Above: Gerald Bull

After trying the Americans, who shockingly turned down the opportunity to build a ludicrously huge cannon, he went about building and selling arms to crazed dictators from all over the world, including South Africa, China, and Iraq. He eventually convinced budding young Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that the only way to make all the cool countries respect him was to have a space program built around his big-ass cannon.

Saddam put him to work building his dream. They made a small scale prototype to work out the kinks, and there were probably several considering the final gun (nicknamed Big Babylon) was to be 500 feet long and 3 feet wide. It would have to be built into a freaking hill, just to stand up.

So Why Don't We Have One?

Before they could import the materials for Big Babylon, Hussein decided to invade Kuwait, and brought down the wrath of the international community.

It turns out part of Iraq's strategy in the Gulf War consisted of shooting at the Israelis. Israel wound up sending the Mossad (they're sort of like the CIA only they're actually good at what they do) after Iraq's weapon suppliers. Shortly thereafter, Bull was found dead in his apartment with 5 bullets in his head.

And thus, another of the world's dreamers died, taking his dreams with him. Just as John Lennon wanted world peace, Gerald Bull simply wanted a gun big enough to fire shit into space.

4 The Atom Bomb-Powered Spacecraft

Even when space travel was still on the drawing board, mankind was full of visions of missions to Mars and space hotels. We saw with sinking disappointment that people could only go up in tiny little capsules with stale air, cramped quarters, and crappy food, and even then only after decades of training.

But there was a pair of crazy bastards named Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson who headed a project to build a huge, sci-fi atomic spacecraft. And no, we don't mean that it worked on atomic power (though NASA tried to do that, too, with a project called NERVA). We're talking about something way, way more awesome than that.

Freeman Dyson totally doesn't look crazy or anything.

Their idea was a mammoth spaceship weighing up to 7 million tons that ran on nuclear bombs. Yes, nuclear bombs. As in, you take a huge spaceship, and stick a fucking nuke under it, then set it off. These guys would have taken one look at the giant gun guy and laughed in his face.

So the ship gets flung into the atmosphere by the nuclear explosion that just happened under it. Then what? It's going to start slowing down eventually, right? Well, you drop another nuke out of the concave (and heavily armored) bottom of the ship, and detonate it when it gets about 200 feet away. Rinse and repeat until you're in orbit. What could possibly go wrong?

Uhh...

Oddly enough, the lift-off would actually be smoother than any shuttle liftoff because the sheer mass of the enormous vehicle would almost completely eliminate turbulence. Initial tests were conducted with C4 and determined that the project was not only feasible, but actually exceeded expectations.

So Why Don't We Have One?

First, a bunch of party-pooping anti-nuclear types got a hold of it and started on with their "fallout" this and "environmental catastrophe" that. Then when the 1963 Treaty banning upper atmospheric nuclear detonation was signed it basically gave the project the kiss of death.

That's right, it took a Treaty to convince people that a nuclear-bomb-shitting space city was a bad idea.

3 Buzz Aldrin's Martian Gravity Express

After Nixon started the 1970s fad of slashing NASA's budget whenever they asked for money, it became something of a government tradition. To try to deal with having craptastic funding, NASA veteran Buzz Aldrin came up with a clever idea to save money going to Mars: Don't use any fuel.

Instead of actually powering the ship, he suggested you use Earth's gravity like a slingshot, shooting it into mars' gravitation field, which then would sling it back at earth. It would theoretically continue with this gravitational slingshottery until the end of time, using almost no fuel, and allowing them to load it up with equipment and personnel in a detachable cargo ship to drop every time it got close to Mars.

Above: Cracked's childlike grasp on this complex concept.

Also, you would get two going in opposite directions, because the way the gravity system works out, the trip there is nice and speedy, but the trip back takes a while. This way one of the ships would spend the short trip going Mars to earth, and the other would be earth to mars. No problem!

So Why Don't We Have One?

The long end of the trip takes about 21 months. At about this point the guys at NASA stopped listening, because who the hell wants to wait two years to be able to send another shuttle?

This also means the departure times are non-negotiable. Still working out the kinks on your little Mars rover? Too bad, the bus is leaving! Better luck next time, assholes!

2 Farming Man-Made Space Meat

Ever wanted to know what panda tastes like? How about orangutang? What if we told you that you could have meat from any animal on the planet you like. You could even find out what person tastes like (and don't pretend you haven't wondered)! All you would need is a small tissue sample.

A few years back, the fellows at NASA were working on improving their astronauts' dinners, since one of the major complaints they got from the crews was the food. Eating freeze-dried mystery meals apparently gets old after a few weeks, and they wanted steak dammit.

Because they couldn't bring a whole cow up with them without accidentally creating the plot for the next animated movie from Dreamworks, NASA thought of a different solution: Why don't they make their own steak?

It was as close as we got to the Star Trek style replicators. Basically they took a vat of nutrient-rich water, threw in some chemicals to induce cell division, and dropped a few small samples of fish muscle in. A few days later they had several small lumps of fish-meat. They then cooked it up in a pan of oil with a little bit of garlic, some lemon, and a just a touch of cracked pepper.

So Why Don't We Have It?

The result looked and even smelled like fish, but when they asked for a volunteer to taste it, they quickly realized no one wanted to eat a $200 lab-grown muscle tumor.

That's a problem, because NASA wants to go to Mars in the next few decades and the crew could spend up to two years in space. So either astronauts develop a taste for tumor or NASA's is going to have to find a Black Agnus with outstanding hand eye coordination.

1 Project Daedalus: The 50,000 Ton Interstellar Suicide Machine

While at one of their zany science parties, the British Interplanetary Society (yes, it's an actual organization, and yes, they actually hold zany parties) decided to seek the answer to a problem: How can you achieve interstellar travel with technology available now, or in the near future?

The model they came up with was a 570-foot behemoth called the Daedalus. Powered by nuclear fusion from 50,000 metric tons of helium-3 and deuterium fuel, it could get up to the speed of 21,277,777.8 meters per second, fast enough get from LA to Paris in a brisk 0.426 seconds.

Of course, at that speed if you hit a tiny dust particle, the damage would be catastrophic. To get around this, they gave the design a big beryllium shield to get rid of all the small specs, and (seriously) a big cloud of dust enveloping the craft that would obliterate virtually anything that got in its way. That's right, a goddam particle shield.

So Why Don't We Have One?

Even though all the technology called for in the design has been around since the 90s, the cost would be (forgive the expression) astronomical. Do you have any idea how much it costs to get your hands on 50,000 tons of deuterium/helium-3 pellets? A fucking lot.

Also, because of its enormous size, it would need to be constructed in orbit one bit at a time, and when it costs 10 million bucks to put one metric ton of crap into space, it would cost in the vicinity of $540 billion just to ship the raw materials up to the construction site. If only there were some way to get these things into space quickly and cheaply... like a cannon of some sort....

Hey, remember me? From before?

The other problem was that, in space, stopping is even harder than moving. This thing didn't really have brakes built into the design, so the plan was to instead have it take a bunch of pictures real fast while it zipped by the destination, beaming the images back to Earth as it went.

It then would zip through the system at Mach 64,000, presumably going on to crash into a planet, star, or unsuspecting alien.

In other words, we had something that would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, require cooperation on a global scale, take forever to get there and at the end, we'd just have a few photographs to remember it. Basically it would be like an interplanetary version of a family trip to Disney World.

To further diminish your faith in science, check out 10 Famous Sci-Fi Weapons That They're Actually Building. Or take a look at The Insane True Story Behind the Birth of the Internet.