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Homer Hickam Speaks Out For Fission Rockets
jonerik writes: "Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam (perhaps best known for his 1998 memoir "Rocket Boys," which was turned into the 1999 motion picture "October Sky") has this article in Technology Review in which he advocates that the U.S. revive its nuclear rocket program of the '50s and '60s, arguing that nuclear-powered rockets are the only realistic way of opening up the rest of the solar system - particularly Mars - to human exploration."
Doh!!!
Here is a link to that : here
Anyway, nuclear rockets are a great idea. A better one, you may have heard me harp on this before, is VASIMR. It is a plama rocket with a nuke power source. It will be around ten times as efficient as the nuke rockers. However, the VASIMR, unlike the nuclear rocket, it does not have enough thrust to launch from earth. It is more a slow and steady engine that runs for weeks instead of minutes. But the burnout velocity of a VASIMR can be vastly higher than a chemical rocket.
The nuclear rocket can provide cheap, efficient space launches with not too much radioactive fallout. In fact, if a nuclear rocket using helium as a propelent will produce no fallout at all. Since a nuclear rocket is about twice or three times as efficient as a chemical rocket, the amount of fuel you'd need would be slashed dramatically. A nuke rocket launch might only use 10% or less of the fuel that a conventional booster would.
It's under R&D.
It ionizes hydrogen with microwaves an then accelerates them with magnetic fields. While it doen't provide thrust like a chemical rocket, it certainly has many, many times more thrust than a ion engine. It has some oomph to it. For cheap launches, you really need somthing like the x-42 scramjet spaceplane. That would cut costs of launching by a factor of 10 with no giant lasers.
VASIMR will get a specific impulse of 30,000 seconds compared to 500 seconds for the shuttle's engines. A specific impulse is the number of seconds 1 kg. of fuel could produce 1 kg. of thrust. The specific impulse of the VASIMR is 60 times better than the shuttle. That is many times better than the ~1500 seconds you'd get with the nuclear rockets.
That would allow cheap interplanetary voyages anywhere in the solar system, using very little fuel. Using these engines, you could get to Saturn in less than a year. It would also allow slow intersteller trips of around 1% the speed of light.
Also, VASIMRs could be easily, cheaply, and quickly refueled for more missions.Interplanetary travel could become cheap. I bet each ship would cost around 5 billion dollars initialy. After that, it's cheap. After each trip, an X-42 could come and restock the ship with fuel and supplies. That would only cost around 50 million. We could send tens of thousands to colonize Mars.
BTW: On this article, it says the VASIMR gets 10,000 seconds. It can reach 30,000 with further development.
Read about the VASIMR here
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If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
There are solar winds and Gravity produced by large masses(ie the sun, jupiter), that need to be resisted/overcome during planet to planet travel.
Not all highways are flat my friend.
Nuclear does scare folks. The medical imaging of NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) got changed to MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) because people were freaking out about the 'nuclear' part. Even though it was passive reading of nuclear states, not actively nuking patients.
l ea r.html
There's a good writeup on:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/mri_not_nuc
The "nuclear rocket" folks could take a page from their book. Call this "water rockets" or such and downplay the nuke, upplay the 'tea kettle' method (or what have you).
A.
To propose that we spend more money on NASA (with cutbacks already planned), the "nuclear fission" rocket may just be a pipe dream. It's hard to convince people that we need to explore space when the topic of the day is terrorism.
Well, they go hand in hand. The technology from space exploration affects our lives in thousands of big and small ways every day. The integrated circuit was first mass-produced for space exploration reasons. And it's a lot easier to peel my fried eggs off Teflon than it is off cast iron.
Any advance in getting the general public to get over their Three Mile Island and Chernobyl paranoia will require nuclear-powered triumphs.
Idiot hippy environmentalists speak of cutting dependence on (foreign) oil by moving to electric cars. That'd be nice. How do you intend to handle California's power crisis (remember, 2 years ago) when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters are plugging in their cars every night?
The very same environmentalists who scream about oil and air pollution are also at the mass rallies to ban genetically-modified agriculture. GM corn is probably the most economically feasible way, at this point, to make large quantities of methanol, which could replace gasoline very easily, simply retrofitting existing vehicles and infrastructure. These people also scream that we have to solve world hunger before we feed our cars. (My opinion? Theses savages are stupid enough to breed when they can't feed themselves, let alone their larvae. It doesn't take education or literacy to understand the problem; a below-average human intelligence should readily grasp the situation. It's not my problem, and I resent you attempting to make it my problem.)
Tidal/Solar/Wave power? Sure, they're neat science fair projects for the kiddies, but they're simply not capable of contributing substantially to our energy needs for the forseeble future.
Nuclear power is the only viable solution. And the proles have discarded it because they're too simple to understand that blaming nuclear power for Chernobyl would be like blaming gasoline for a car accident. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the vast majority of car accidents are caused by imbeciles, not the fuel source.
What's all this got to do with terrorism? Simple. The sooner we get off foreign oil, the sooner we can dig a moat around the Middle East and let them do their thing in isolation from the civilized world. And if funding NASA to build huge nuclear public-relations projects which will inevitably bring us other technologies as a consequence, I'm all for it.
Go ahead. Mod me down. But I'm right, and all the politically-correct simpering you might want to do won't change the facts.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I've read the World Health Organization's ten year report and I'd point to it if I could. Unfortunately, that one and a new one are not free information. Order it or go visit a library.
I'm not going to say there are no risks, what I'll ask you to do is weigh the risks of doing nothing. The shutdown of the US space program is a national embarassment. We beat up all the lions, tigers and bears. Even the baboons gave up (Appologies to W. Chruchill). The world is watching us and they expect results. We should show them that it is better co-operate and create new resources than it is to squabble over and destroy old ones. If we wait too long, we may no longer be able to afford the effort.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
look at http://www.solarbuzz.com/FastFactsGermany.htm
It's stats are:
German Energy and Electricity Industry German domestic energy sources in 1998 were:
Coal: 46%,
Nuclear power: 31%,
Natural Gas: 14%,
Renewable Energy: 6%
Oil: 3%.
In consumption terms, though, oil accounted for 44%
There's a very dirty (quite literally) secret about coal burning few people talk about: the fact it releases a substantial amount of radioactive material into the air. People forget that trace amounts of radioactive elements exist in many forms of coal.
Correct, for the most part. I was going to make your post. I would add a minor correction, however. The amount of the genome made up of viral-DNA is more in the low double digit percentage. If you count retrotransposable elements, VERY closely related to retroviruses (like LINE1 elements) the number of those alone is 17%. Throw in Alu elements, SINES, Ty elements...you are talking a not-insignificant portion of the genome.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.