Spin Drive

Item from Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

An engine that tricks starlight-eating microbes into pushing a spaceship — 1,009 of them strapped to the Hail Mary, burning six grams of impossible fuel per second.

Also known as: Spin Drive, Spin Drives

What They Know

• Three-phase Astrophage manipulation cycle: attract → rotate/push → scrape/repeat
• 1,009 individual drives on the Hail Mary consuming 6.045 g/s total
• Achieves 1.5g acceleration and near-light-speed cruising velocity
• Designed by Dimitri Komorov based on his insight that Astrophage could serve as fuel
• Exploits Astrophage attraction to specific IR wavelengths (4.26μm and 18.31μm CO2 lines)

Connections

• designed_by — komorov
• powers — hail_mary
• uses — astrophage

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