I recently came across this little number while messing around looking at different ways to reduce launch costs. As I’d never heard of this approach before, I thought I’d ask around and see if anyone here knew any details about it.
It seems to me from perusing the site that it is an excellent approach. I suspect the reason it never took off was the fact that it was nucular, and we all know how them contraptions is prone to exploding at the drop of a hat.
Seems like a good idea indeed and I wonder why we don’t take advantage of nuclear power more than we do, especially in spacecraft. Weren’t the Viking landers nuclear powered?
Perhaps the idea of firing nukes around the Earth as if they would be M-80s didn´t appeal the public? :rolleyes: I don´t like it neither, the idea of a rocket carrying nukes on board for the Orino ship in orbit going boom! is something to be quite concerned about, I like my rain non-glowing, thank-you-very-much.
Now, if we´re talking about building the thing from, let´s say, the Moon, I´m all for it, just be sure you don´t point the exhaust in the wrong direction.
As Ale says, quite apart from the international treaties which prevent the militarisation of space, the issue of having actual nuclear warheads sitting a mere 20 miles above your airspace is something of a concern, both for accidents and sheer peace of mind.
(Attaining 10% of lightspeed within 4 months is possible using around one million warheads. Would the US be OK about such a Chinese spacecraft orbiting 20 miles above the Eastern Seaboard?)
However, once in space, there is very little danger except by way of frying satellites with the EM pulse. The Earth’s atmosphere absorbs way more energy from the sun than that produced by a nuke.
Awww, well, just 10 people would suffer a slow and painful death then; quite acceptable, as long as you, one of your parents or siblings is not among those ten, I suppose. :rolleyes:
Not to speak if, you know, the whole thing just blows up in it´s way up and scatters thousands of nukes around, Al Qaeda would do the happy dance: Mana from heaven! Or it would be just messy with thousands of tons of radioactive waste laying around-
Now that I mention Al Qaeda, imagine thousands of small, portable nukes beign churned out of a factory like hotdogs, it wouldn´t take much for one or two to go astray, slipped somewhere some time. Mass production of nukes doesn´t seem sensible.
As I said, build it in the Moon, the worst thing that could happen there is that there would be a new crater to look at. Meanwhile, here on Earth we may find other ways to do the job of hauling stuff up into orbit.
Ale, you’d only require thousands of nukes if you were going to Alpha Centauri. At 0.1c. If that solution is unacceptable to you, perhaps you can propose some other way of accelerating to that speed. In either case, we would not need “thousands of nukes” to realize the best benefit: inexpensive launch costs.
That, plus some amount of addtional fuel for interplanetary travel, would essentially turn our solar system into our backyard. I, personally, think pole-vaulting our space program three or more generations into the future would be worth the risks.
And as for it being built on the moon, what advantage do you expect to be gained from that?
The “violates world treaties” argument no longer has any effect on me, considering the events of the past year or two. If pissing off the rest of the world was worth it for Iraq, I daresay it would be worth it for dirt-cheap launch costs.
Even the idea of using nuclear propulsion from ground-to-orbit is, I think, enough to politically kill off the idea. Imagine if they short the thing off from the test grounds in Nevada where they tested the bombs. There’s still political fallout from the nuclear fallout over St. George, Utah, and other such places. This would be far. far worse. You’ld have to move it somewhere far, far away before people would even consider this. Somewhere in the South Pacific, maybe. And even then you’d have considserable resistance.
There are other nuclear propulsion possibilities. Heinlein frequently wrote about “torschships” in his juveniles that basically squirted out matter accelerated to high temps by a reactor. He even used such a ship in his film Destination Moon. Hard to imagine a rocket in the American Southwest that worked by squirting out radioactive water being tolerated today.
I take it that you would be happy with Russia or China launching in northern latitudes safe in the knowledge that the Jet Stream will carry the radioactive fallout far away from their own cities, across the Bering Straits and into the heart of America?
Orion-style projects may well have currency in future from space-based launches, but not in terms of launch from Earth.
Pulsed fusion would be wonderful – the overwhelming amount of exhaust being helium (there would be a trace of tritium, of course, but my impression is that tritium is not considered a severe health threat).
The problem with this is that nobody seems at all interested in putting the amount of funding behind it to bring fusion power to an economically-feasible level of performance. IMO, it’s the most short-sighted failure of mankind during my entire lifetime.
::: contemplates dropping a full-size thuktun on Squink for beating me to the punch on that reference ::::
The anti-nuke folks have done their jobs too well. No way is an earth to orbit Orion feasible for political reasons…its a non-starter. People are so conditioned to thing anything using nuclear power, energy, etc is evil, bad, etc that you might as well forget it (this doesn’t even get into what other posters said about how other nations would react to using 1 MT micro nukes to power a space craft). Doesn’t matter who the president is, its never going to happen. I seriously doubt that even used for interplanetary travel in the solar system will happen…folks will freak out just at the thought of launching them conventionally into space. Look how they howled when they were putting up nuclear (or noocleaha) powered probes a few years ago. Its just not ever going to happen, reguardless of the benifits we’d see in relatively fast inter-solar system travel, mining, etc.
I assume the baby elephants reference was for the book Foot-Fall (I didn’t read the link)? If so, loved the book. Was the best reference to an actual space craft using available technology I’ve ever seen.
Perhaps Heinlein had heard of Project NERVA, which actually got as far as some ground testing. That approach, more similar to a conventional rocket than Orion, used hydrogen heated by a reactor and accelerated out a nozzle. Though less dangerous than Orion, it still would have spread fallout wherever it went. It died in the post-Apollo budget cuts, while Orion’s death was more because it scared too many people, even (and especially) its own staff.
The oddest thing about the physics of Orion was that its efficiency *increased * with vehicle size, because a larger pusher plate could capture more of the material expelled by the chain of bombs. The early conceptual designs for Orion vehicles were the size of battleships, and planned missions were to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter instead of the Moon. Freeman Dyson’s son George wrote a very readable history of the program titled, imaginatively, Project Orion, if you’re interested.
George Dyson’s Project Orion (Henry Holt, 2002; Penguin, 2003), as recommended by ElvisL1ves, essentially argues that that the project’s demise was institutional. As he puts it at one point, the project on the table at the time was too small for a feasibilty study and too large to actually carry out. Furthermore, none of the agencies who might have sponsored the sort of sums needed at the time could come through with them. Whatever the ultimate technical merits, the project was never likely to have flown under the prevailing circumstances.
Forgive me if you have already linked to this – I read all the posts and some, but not all, of the links.
The House on Friday voted to support Project Prometheus. This is Bush’s proposal to spend $93 million dollars this year and +$2 billion over 5 years on using Nuclear fission in Space for both power and propulsion. Though not orion per se, I thought this might have been appropos to the thread.
For those interested in this subject I reccomend this site http://www.nuclearspace.com/
On checking, the passage I had in mind was actually:
In other words, exactly the opposite of what I recalled. However, Dyson’s point remains that it was institutional considerations that killed the project.
Considering the worldwide protests for the launch of the Cassini probe, which was a single Plutonium reactor, I don’t think that an Orion launch vehicle is politically feasable at this time. Frankly, for surface to orbit launches, I’d rather see more done with two stage, reusable, airframe launched orbiters. Because the initial lift off the ground is by a conventional airframe, and the orbiter takes advantage of that to get to the edge of the sensible atmosphere, my understanding is that the cost per pound to orbit is similar to Orion. I may be wrong, but that is the impression I’ve had.
