The good news is that colliding antimatter with

matter can create the amount of energy and thrust

that would enable spacecraft to visit the planets of
the Solar System in a period of only a few weeks
rather than years, and would open up the possibility
of manned interstellar missions.
The bad news is that obtaining antimatter for
this type of propulsion system is difficult. The
main problem is that antimatter is extremely rare.
Antiprotons have been discovered in the Van
Allen radiation belt that surrounds the Earth. This
amounts to 160 nanograms (one nanogram is one
billionth of a gram) of antimatter that could be
collected by a plasma magnet to power antimatter
spacecraft. It would need at least 30 nanograms of
these antiprotons to send a ship to Mars in 45 days,
so nearby natural supplies would not last very long.
A more long-term solution is to create your
own antimatter, to do this you need an atom
smasher , otherwise known as a high-energy particle
collider. They consist of linear or circular tunnels
(like the CERN s Large Hadron Collider) lined
with supermagnets, that send particles at close
to light speed into a target. On hitting the target
antiparticles are produced that can be collected by a
magnetic field.
The scale of the problem can be gauged by the
fact that with today s technology only a few shortlived
nanograms of antimatter can be produced a
year, so it would need a dedicated facility to produce
antimatter for space missions.
Assuming the production problems are overcome,
an antimatter spaceship could be fuelled with
pellets made of uranium with a core of deuterium
and tritium isotopes. Beams of antiprotons would
be fired at the pellets, resulting in the annihilation
of the uranium that would generate enough energy
to cause the fusion of the isotopes. The resulting
release of vast amounts of energy are confined in a
chamber and directed out of a nozzle to direct the
thrust of the spacecraft, or the energy could be used
to heat a propellant to produce the necessary thrust.
Plasma Core drives are just about within the
realms of possibility, but Beamed Core drives would
eliminate the need for secondary fuel pellets and
be much more efficient. The matter and antimatter
would be annihilated in a magnetic nozzle and the
resulting energy is ejected out of the engine at near
light speed. Accelerating the spacecraft up to 40 per
cent of the speed of light, it would make trips to the
nearest stars a possibility.