NASA’s Artemis II moon rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara) Recently, two of the powerful men on the planet where space policy is concerned had an exchange on the social media platform X about antimatter. The exchange is another example of how what was once science fiction is becoming reality.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted, “In the future, a trillion times a trillion dollars will be spent on making antimatter to travel to other star systems.” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman replied, “I support antimatter propulsion.”
While the name antimatter invokes countless references in science fiction, it is a real thing. Antimatter is the mirror twin of matter, having the same mass but having opposite properties such as electric charges.
The reason that antimatter could become the ultimate spacecraft propellant is that when matter and antimatter collide, they are both transformed 100 percent into energy. Even a nuclear bomb converts only a small amount of its mass into an explosion that can wipe out a city.
An antimatter rocket, one that uses the explosion caused by the fusion of matter and antimatter, would be orders of magnitude more efficient that a chemical or even a nuclear rocket. Not only Mars, but the outer solar system would be within reach. The technology could be used to send probes across interstellar space to other star systems.
However, three great impediments exist to antimatter rockets. They are the problems of producing and then storing antimatter and the design of the rocket itself.
Antimatter does exist in nature, in microscopic amounts. According to Symmetry Magazine, this fact is puzzling to astrophysicists because the Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts.
Nevertheless, tiny amounts of antimatter particles are created by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, lightning strikes and even the natural decay of bananas. These particles are instantly destroyed when they encounter matter.
Only a tiny amount of antimatter has been created in the laboratory at great cost, measured in the nanograms in facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Whereas a gram of antimatter could cause an explosion equivalent to a nuclear bomb, the amount that has been created couldn’t even boil a teacup full of water. The amount of antimatter needed to propel a spacecraft would be orders of magnitude what has already been created, especially for an interstellar mission.
The problem with current technology for creating antimatter is that it is very expensive, especially in the amount of energy required. One estimate suggests that creating just one gram of antimatter would cost $62.5 trillion using current technology.
The problem of containing antimatter so that it doesn’t cause an explosion by coming in contact with the outside world is also daunting. Currently, scientists have technology to store the miniscule particles they create, using Penning Traps and Ioffe Traps. But technology for storing the amount of antimatter necessary to propel a spacecraft currently doesn’t exist.
If the problems of creating antimatter in quantity and storing it safely were solved, how would an antimatter rocket work? The creation of an antimatter rocket engine requires solving a third problem. How does one direct the energy created by annihilating matter and antimatter into thrust that would propel a spacecraft?
According to How Stuff Works, something called a magnetic rocket thruster, which works like a particle accelerator, may be able to move the energy created from a matter/antimatter explosion and create thrust to propel the spacecraft.
Gizmodo notes that a matter/antimatter explosion creates 10,000 times more energy than a chemical rocket and 300 times more energy than a fusion rocket. Such immense energy, properly harnessed, could increase the velocity of spacecraft by orders of magnitude. It could open up the solar system, including the outer planets, to human activity. It could make exploration of the nearer star systems a practical reality.
While one hesitates to predict when antimatter rockets could become a practical reality, one suspects that they are some decades away, closer to the end of the current century than the beginning, However, a company called Positron Dynamics claims to be able to generate “intense beams of cold positrons” that would allow for “a rocket engine 1,000x more efficient than current state of the art ion/plasma thrusters.
Perhaps, considering Isaacman’s and Musk’s interest in the technology, more effort and resources could be spent toward developing antimatter rockets.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
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