Alternatively, why can’t we put a particle accelerator on the back of a rocket and use that?
Edit: okay thanks guys it was a dumb question I see that now lol
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You can create something called an ion drive which can power a spacecraft in the vacuum of space, they are good for slow steady acceleration, but poor from escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity. https://youtu.be/KFL623O9CXQ
Because the more mass something has, the more energy is required to accelerate it. We are able to get particles in CERN going that fast because they are incredibly small – and thus don’t require all that much energy (still a ton) to accelerate. A rocket a mindboggling amount larger than a single proton, so it takes an _exponentially_ mindboggling amount of energy to move it at the same speed.
Are you asking why it’s harder to accelerate something weighing tons compared to accelerating a proton?
Mass.
The answer is mass.
The difference being MANY orders of magnitude, the same reason why it’s easy to throw a baseball and harder to throw a planet.
Rockets are big. Particles are small.
The Space Shuttle weighed about 2 million kilograms. A proton, which is mostly what CERN is slamming into things, weighs 1.6 x 10^-27 kg. That’s a difference of about 33 orders of magnitude.
For scale, the **entire Earth** weighs about 6 x 10^24 kg, so a rocket is as much bigger than a proton as the Earth is than a tiny speck of dust weighing micrograms.
> Alternatively, why can’t we put a particle accelerator on the back of a rocket and use that?
You could, and in fact, [we do](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster). But because particles are so light, the amount of thrust generated is very very very very very very very VERY small. Such engines can’t even lift their own weight, much less a rocket attached to them.
Rockets carry much more mass than a single particle which makes them much more difficult to accelerate in the same way.
There’s also the added surface area which creates more air-resistance/friction/vibrations that would easily tear any current designs for rockets apart.
A single electron weighs 0.0000000000000000000000000000009 kg
So the energy required to accelerate it to near light speed is relatively low.
The lunar landing module was around 5000kg, so you’re talking 35 orders of magnitude more energy than CERN.
That’s before you even get to issues of material strength and acceleration. An electron can survive 100,000g of acceleration, an astronaut would be pulped into orange juice.
There is a theoretical space launch technique called a mass driver which sort of like using a particle accelerator but for a satellite. There is a company called SpinLaunch that has announced plans to develop such a system though whether we will see a functional one any time soon is doubtful.
Well, we could, I suppose. Need one heck of an enormous and powerful electromagnetic accelerator though, like solar-system size range. Not likely to happen any time soon.
I don’t think you quite understand how small and nearly massless a positron or electron is. They are a fraction of an atom, and atoms have to be accumulated in numbers of 10^23 to even get into a gram range of mass. So, multiply that km-sized accelerator by something like 10 followed by 30 zeroes, to get into the equivalent size, to scale it properly.
Because CERN uses about a cities worth of power when its on.
For more context…
CERN has an Annual energy usage estimated at 2,190 GWh?? Just to fling atoms of material around haphazardly inside a precisely made and static magnet.
The SpaceX Starship probably uses 10 GWh per launch??? To send ~100 tons to orbit in a rocket that vibrates and shakes.
We got a loooooong ass way before those two catch up.
It takes a huge amount of energy to get a single molecule up to that speed in a particle accelerator. The energy to get an entire rocket up to speed isn’t possible for people to generate.
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