u/DreamChaserSt

Does anyone have links to studies where they were looking at a 5 engine configuration, or is the animation just some holdover from Ares V?

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight3.php#quarknuggets

With antimatter discussion picking up again, has there been any new research on these? Whether it's being seen as more unlikely, or picking up any traction?

I was recently looking at the antimatter page again, and this was basically a footnote at the bottom of discussion for antimatter factories that I half forgot about. With the speculation that "fast rotators" (quickly rotating asteroids) have tiny (mm in radius), but extremely massive cores that can be bombarded with a 100 MeV particle stream to generate massive amounts of antimatter basically on demand.

Speculatively, if these exist, could we harvest the energy source required to reach other stars long before the end of the century? And robotic probes could reach other stars well within a human lifetime.

The parts that have been shown so far look great, especially since some of them are modular. But it does look like there's a lot of focus on existing historical parts. So I was wondering as that list is expanded, it could include components for vehicles that were designed but never flown, alongside components that were used/inspired for the Space Race onward?

Such as:

M-1 (a massive hydrolox engine that would've been used on Nova (post-Apollo), and replaced the J-2 engines).

Original Shuttle concepts (like the original North American Rockwell delta wing design)

Mars Excursion Module (proposed lander for post-Apollo crewed Mars missions)

Space Base (proposed station in the 1970s that would've used artificial gravity, and could've been built to support up to 50 Astronauts)

Liquid Rocket Boosters (like what was proposed for STS, or Pyrios for SLS)

RD-270 (the first FFSC engine, and the Soviet's equivalent to the F-1)

UR-700/UR-900 (Alternatives to the N-1, using the RD-270)

Ariane X (a concept in the 80s for a partially reusable Ariane vehicle)

Hermes (a canceled European spaceplane)

This should also include programs and concepts in the last 30 or so years that were proposed or canceled for more modern components. Like NASA's Constellation plans or Mars Direct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struve_2398

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22815

I overlooked this I think, since the Habitable Worlds Catolog hasn't been updated in 2 years, and this was found in 2025 (arxiv paper in January 2026). It's a very intriguing discovery though. And is now part of the list of the closest known exoplanets.

The star is a quarter the size and mass of the Sun, making it larger and brighter than Proxima Centauri (which is 12% of the mass). It's the secondary member of a binary red dwarf system. The primary is about a third the mass and size of the Sun, and they're separated by 63 AU. Both are flare stars, but I don't know exactly how much they flare. Though, I think this research is still relevant in that regard: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/507/2/1723/6339287?login=false&guestAccessKey= In that flares around convective red dwarfs happen at high latitudes, and would miss orbiting planets.

The binary pair is also much older than the Sun, about 8.7 billion years old.

Both systems have planetary systems, though both systems have only been found in the last few years. The primary star has 1 known planet so far, and the secondary star has 2, one confirmed, one unconfirmed.

The recently found potentially habitable exoplanet orbits the secondary member every 37.9 days at a distance of 0.139 AU, so it's likely tidally locked if it has a circular orbit (or in spin resonance like Mercury if it has an elliptical orbit).

Based on the star's luminosity and the planet's distance from the star, it receives a similar, but slightly higher amount of starlight as Mars receives compared to Earth (Flux of 0.47 vs 0.43).

The planet isn't known to transit, so the planet was found with radial velocity, with an estimated mass of 3.4 Earths. Unlike other recently found exoplanets in the habitable zone, with masses between 5-7 Earth masses (Like GJ 887d, GJ 3998d, 55 Cnc Bc), this is a relatively lower-mass Super-Earth. So it may be more likely to be rocky, though without a radius to figure out the density and bulk composition, that's unknown.

A radius of between 1.6-1.7 Earth's would give the planet a density similar to Mars (71%) or moderately less than Earth (83%), with a surface gravity 17-32% higher than Earth's.