Maybe someday, eventually. But even in the next half-century we’re more likely to see any large-scale activity to the Moon or Mars use in-situ resource utilization (isru) rather than nuclear. For a methane chemical rocket liquid oxygen is 80% of the fuel mass needed and for a liquid hydrogen rocket it’s 88+%. If you can top up a rocket with liquid oxygen on the Moon or Mars, then chemical remains highly competitive.
Which leads me to the second biggest problem with nuclear thermal: it’s not all that much better. An ordinary hydrogen-oxygen flame is already as hot as the best cleverness of engineers can cope with. Nuclear thermal (at least solid core) cannot exceed the melting point of the fission fuel, and for heat to flow the propellant has to be cooler than that. The only reason fission offers any improvement in performance at all is if liquid hydrogen is used as the propellant, because its lighter molecular weight yields a higher exhaust velocity. This gives a performance improvement over hydrogen-oxygen of about a factor of two. This at the price of using all-hydrogen for your reaction mass (nowhere near as common as oxygen in the inner solar system), with the attendant storage problems for a weeks/months long mission to Mars. Plus all the headaches associated with a virulently radioactive engine.
Now fusion, if it actually works, would offer stupendous exhaust velocities, even if the thrust was low. That would be worth having, at least provided that your fusion engines don’t cost five billion dollars each to build.
I think the bigger problem is that the media reports are imbecilic and they literally can’t figure out what he’s saying:
Jesus Christ. I’m going to conclude absolutely nothing about the testimony until the transcript is released.
Probably he was a little vague, as all such hearings are. Plus he’s a little new to Washington games. It’s essentially required that they make impossible and contradictory commitments but he may not quite have the knack yet for doing so smoothly.
For any other administration regime I’d agree 100%. Given the regime we’re actually dealing with, I’m gonna bet there’s a lot more empty-headed incompetence than anything else.
This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.
According to the “passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
The budget cuts also appear intended to force the closure of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where the agency has 10,000 civil servants and contractors. Looking it up I see both Senators and 7 out of 8 Representatives in Maryland are Democrats.
If the people in Washington simply don’t want to pay for a space program, they should say so out loud and in so many words. This business of NASA’s budget getting cut back and cut back and then NASA lying about the programs remaining viable because they’re desperately hoping to salvage them is getting ridiculous. You can’t go to the Moon for $5.87.
So, what do all you folks think about the recent all-female Blue Origin foray into space? There’s a certain demographic who have gone ape doodoo about it, mainly because Katy Perry squealed, “Oh, my goddess!” when she went into zero gravity. Some people also think the whole thing was faked or staged; I disagree because that would be awfully difficult to do IMHO.
I certainly don’t think it was faked; I do certainly think that it was a “staged” flight, in that it was done purely for PR, with an all-star female crew, which included Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend.
Very little, and that’s always been the case. Rockets fly into orbit entirely under the control of flight computers following the programmed trajectory. Really we ride rockets, not fly them. The pilot is more technically the mission commander, in charge of making top-level decisions like if an abort was necessary, and overseeing docking and undocking in orbit.
Fun fact: when the USAF was considering making the X-20 “Dynasoar” spaceplane a manned nuclear space bomber in the early 1960s, the pilot would have selected different contingency targets by pushing buttons for preprogrammed trajectories; there was no way to “fly” the X-20 except on its landing approach.
I’m vaguely aware, because I actively avoid viewing memes or listening to unenlightened talk about politics and current events (sadly, one got through), that there has been some criticism of the recent Blue Origin flight. The gist seems to be comparing it unfavorably to Sunita Williams’ long, unplanned stay on the ISS.
Without knowing more, I’d say it’s a silly comparison in two ways. First, Williams’ flight was a completely different undertaking, with trained professional astronauts. Any Blue Origin flight is, by design, a short tourist hop.
However, that’s not to say there’s no risk in a Blue Origin flight. On the contrary, there’s a great deal of risk for the relatively small reward (I wouldn’t go if I were offered a flight for free, though I would accept significant risk for the chance to orbit). Katie Perry and the others on the flight would have been just as dead as a professional astronaut had something gone wrong.
I wouldn’t want someone I care about to go on that sort of flight. It takes some bravery. Were those people equal to professional astronauts? No, and nobody should expect them to be. Silly conversation if anyone is actually having it.
The “nice” thing about a spaceflight amusement ride rather than a ground-based e.g. roller coaster is that your spaceflight will have one of two outcomes: totally most sincerely dead or totally undamaged. Lotta ways to end up crippled, missing limbs, brain damaged, etc., with a roller coaster malfunction. That latter is an outcome I fear a lot more than mere death.
I’d take one of those rocket rides if offered. Too rich for my blood to pay full fare, especially now that my portfolio is suffering vandalism. But with a big enough subsidy, or free? Count me in.
I was about to start kindergarten when Apollo 11 happened, and was as excited about being allowed to eat my breakfast in the living room as I was about this. When I found out I couldn’t be the first woman in space, I then wanted to be the first woman on the moon, and theoretically I still could be but I doubt it will happen.
I now have no desire to do anything like this, but it’s always fun to see other people doing it. I do hope Blue Origin remains casualty-free.
This was pure glam space tourism at it’s finest and there’s nothing wrong with that. They started out posing for Elle magazine on the front cover along with individual glamor shots. If you’re interested you can see who did their individual styling, hair, and makeup. As a group they created their own matching jumpsuits for the flight.
I don’t have a problem with this as long as they present themselves as passengers on a preprogrammed tourist flight. This is not how they were portrayed. They were presented as crew of a spaceship. They made this infinitely worse when they spent a significant part of their limited time posing for the cameras. And their group flotation was painful to watch. They pissed away the best part of the flight.
The only thing that could make it worse was a tacky kissing of the ground after they landed. The entire endeavor looked like it was choreographed by a child who just learned how to write.
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