It is a variant on the Sanger antimatter rocket. One of the key difficulties of harnessing the energy from matter/antimatter collisions is that most of the energy released by them is in the X-ray and gamma ray spectrum. The redshift rocket proposes to use particle beams, such as those produced by ultrafast laser pulses. Both the matter and antimatter would be accelerated to near light speed away from the spacecraft before colliding in the reaction chamber. This would lead to the radiation that reaches the spacecraft being redshifted. If the speed of the particle beams is great enough, the radiation that hits the spacecraft will be of a frequency that can be reflected. Energy absorbed by the spacecraft could be used to help power the particle beams.
But as a result only a very small fraction of the matter/antimatter annihilation reaction would contribute to the propulsion and the main source of thrust would be the particle beams themselves, which must be generated by other means.
Since a rocket must carry all its reaction mass with it, most of the first reaction mass goes towards accelerating reaction mass rather than payload.
The speed ratio of a rocket nozzle is mostly determined by it's area expansion ratio- this is the ratio of the area of the throat to the area at the exit.
Rockets can use ablative materials that erode in a controlled fashion, or very high temperature materials, such as graphite, ceramics or certain exotic metals.
An antimatter rocket is a proposed type of rocket that uses antimatter as its power source.
For example, an antimatter rocket could take one ton of cargo to the interplanetary space using about 400 micrograms of antimatter, or to the low earth orbit using half of that amount.
For comparison, 95-98% of launch weight of modern chemical rockets such as Zenit or Saturn V is taken by fuel and fuel tanks.
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