[Spaceships] Anti-Lithium for Drives – Does this work?

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Any scheme for antimatter rockets for lift is immediately suspicious, if you care at all about the place you are leaving.

There are exceptions. In principle, for example, you could have a rocket that worked by using a working fluid (probably water) as reaction mass, energized by combining it with a tiny amount of antimatter (very tiny amounts, for reasonably-massed ships).

The result would be a rocket that produced very little radiation but could in theory give bountiful thrust. In practice, we're a long way from being able to build such a thing, we don't know how to store tiny amounts of seetee in reasonably-massed/volume storage systems, and we'd have to make the antimatter at high expense.

But it's possible in principle, and if we could built it it wouldn't be devastating to its launch area. You'd probably want to launch it in open areas, like a patch of desert, but it wouldn't be a WMD for the launch site.