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The Halo Drive

Cool Worlds · 525.8K views · 2019-03-01 · 17:34

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Overview

Astrophysicist David Kipping presents the halo drive, a proposed way to propel a starship to a good fraction of light speed by gaining energy from a black hole. The video is based on his peer-reviewed paper and explains why energy is the main obstacle to interstellar flight.

On Hacker News

HN readers point to it as a clear explanation of a theoretical fuel-free propulsion concept from a channel they respect.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysicsSpace exploration & spaceflight
Search by tags
halo driveblack holesrelativistic travelspaceflightastrophysics

What people said

mperham · 2023-01 · Strong recommendation

Prof. Kipping is well known for his Cool Worlds youtube channel, which is fantastic. He created a video on his Halo Drive idea: [VIDEO]

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chii · 2021-08 · Recommendation

also, you can use light, instead of matter. Termed the "halo drive", it's a very nice theoretical concept: [VIDEO]

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jp555 · 2019-06 · Recommendation

The halo drive concept is interesting. It uses a beam of light to extract gravity energy from a black hole and use to to maintain acceleration of your ship. Almost no fuel needed because its really just a kind of extreme gravity assist that we’ve been doing since what, the 1970s? [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Cool Worlds, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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