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Lockheed Martin to Build Nuclear Powered Spacecraft
LouisvilleDebugger writes "The BBC reports that Lockheed Martin have received a $6M contract to develop the nuclear powered
JIMO, or Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. (According to the NASA project site, the first probes would not launch before 2011 due to development lead time.) On arrival at Jupiter, the extra power allows the probe to orbit each of three of the Galilean moons (Ganymede, Callisto, and most challenging from a radiation exposure standpoint, Europa) in turn, presumably helping to establish the possibility of liquid water and hence, life within the Jovian system. JIMO is a sub-project of Project Prometheus, initiated by NASA this year for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear powered and propelled spacecraft may be safely designed and tested."
"JIMO is a sub-project of Project Prometheus, initiated by NASA this year for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear powered and propelled spacecraft may be safely designed and tested."
Do they really think that it can be completely safe? What if it crashes onto earth just after launch? Or it blows up in the air, so radioactive particles get spread all around?
Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing"
maybe this thing would have a chance of getting off the ground. Unfortunately the enviroloonies, are so terrified of the word 'nuclear' that any project that has it attached will get protested into the ground...
Black and grey are both shades of white.
It is probably too soon after Columbia for them to start talking publicly about this kind of project---confidence in NASA isn't exactly at a high now. Nuclear power has already been used for satellites, and there have been some scary moments when these satellites have come back down. This probe, at least, would not be designed to come back to the Earth. But while IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), it seems like launch vehicles still have a dismaying tendency to blow up with some regularity, and if NASA scatters radioactive isotopes all over the place then that could set space exploration back decades. Oh, and kill a lot of stuff.
This post is dedicated to all of those
Not only is the space program a waste of money
I suppose telecommunications sattelites are a waste of money too?
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
Absolutely everywhere on Earth that there is liquid water, there is life. As long as there is liquid water, life can exist in virtually any environment, deriving power from oxygen, sunlight, sulfide, nitrate, whatever. Life can exist under extreme pressure conditions, hyper-saline conditions, even radioactive conditions.
If we found liquid water on Europa and there was no life, an excellent research question would be, "why not? why is Earth special?". So either way, interesting results would be returned.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Space exploration via chemical propellants will never be economically viable in the large scale. We simply *must* research and develop much more powerful propulsion systems if we are ever to get off this planet in a big way. And yes, it is dangerous. There will be accidents, and loss of life. As long as this is not the result of negligance or outright stupidity, it is a necessary price we must pay as a species for this knowledge. Prometheus was a superb choice name for this project. Man is literally learning how to tame sunfire. There were countless accidents, mistakes and deaths before we learned how to make large scale passenger transportation by air practical. When the first first commercial jetliner (Dehaviland comet) with pressurized cabins was developed, they found out that the cyclic stresses from the pressure changes caused metal fatigue on the thin outer skin, causing the windows to eventually pop out in flight. Oops... But eventually we got it more or less right.
The same is true with spacecraft. Rocket science IS hard. It will take a lot of trial and error effort before we really learn how to do it right. We are still barely past the equivalent of the Wright brothers era of space exploration.
My rights don't need management.
Greenpeace reports that between 1950 and 1993 there have been 380 nuclear weapons accidents, some involving the accidental "dirty bomb" incidents, such as the dispersion of nuclear materials over Palomares in southern Spain.
Now according to the the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository who studied the Palomares incident as well as many other cases, a 78 year old person with elevated Pu in their bones will only have a 0.14285 probability of dying this year, whereas a normal american 78 year old will have an average probaility of dying this year of 0.12780.
We're already dropping nuclear material all over ourselves, and for the most part, you aren't going to hear about it until it's declassified.
Furthermore, have you been to Hiroshima and stood under the peace dome? Have you seen the children playing in the schools at Nagasaki?
The oppertunites for using peaceful nuclear power to explore space far outweigh the risks. Those accidents haven't degraded my environmental quality. I'm sure that a deliberate attack on myself would, but even that will heal with time.
We are talking about the power to reach out and travel the cosmos.
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america.
When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
If we don't have deep space capability, then we are dead meat when we come across those who do. Especially if they are ex-earth colonists who decide to return. No chance of benevolance through alien genetics there.
Considering both spacecraft were nuclear powered, the similarity is not too surprising. There's a nuclear power plant and some form of nuclear electric propulsion system at one end, a long boom, with heat radiators (the heat 'sink' for the power plant), and a bunch of stuff that we don't want close to a running reactor at the other end.
I think the anti-nuclear crowd have NO understanding of nuclear power, to say the least.
Let's take a look at Chernobyl, the anti-nuke crowd's favorite example of nuclear hazards. There were two major things about that disaster: 1) there was NO containment structure to keep the radioactive particle release to a reasonable level if something did go wrong, and 2) the reactor's design was an inherently unsafe design to start with. That ill-advised test caused the fissile material to overheat, and when they tried to moderate it with graphite rods the result was a major explosion of radioactive materials into the air.
The latest in nuclear reactor designs (the pebble-bed reactor) is vastly more safer than previous nuclear reactors, since by design it is nearly impossible to melt down the fissile material in the reactor itself. Also, unlike older reactor designs the pebble-bed reactor doesn't need massive cooling structures, which adds a lot to the cost of construction. Because of its inherent safety, that's why the Prometheus reactors for space use will be pebble-bed units, which don't need to be large-sized units like the old NERVA engines tested during the 1960's.
And they certainly don't understand nuclear waste storage, either. Today, nuclear waste can be made much less dangerous by mixing the waste with glass (which right there cuts the radioactive output significantly) and then stored in disused salt mines and/or salt domes above spent oil fields. Given that salt is an excellent absorber of radiation, that cuts the radioactive risk even further. In many cases, the higher-level radioactive waste could be re-processed into new nuclear fuel or create nuclear materials for radiotherapy cancer treatments.
New you know why I detest the anti-nuclear crowd in many ways. (getting off soapbox)