🔗 Black Hole Starship

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Science Fiction

A black hole starship is a theoretical idea for enabling interstellar travel by propelling a starship by using a black hole as the energy source. The concept was first discussed in science fiction, notably in the book Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, and in the work of Charles Sheffield, in which energy extracted from a Kerr-Newman black hole is described as powering the rocket engines in the story "Killing Vector" (1978).

In a more detailed analysis, a proposal to create an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking radiation was discussed in 2009 by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland. Their conclusion was that it was on the edge of possibility, but that quantum gravity effects that are presently unknown will either make it easier, or make it impossible. Similar concepts were also sketched out by Bolonkin.