Slashdot Mirror
Clean Nuclear Launches?
AKAImBatman writes "When it comes to launching millions of pounds of material into space, nearly everyone knows about the Orion Project. Blow up a series of nuclear bombs under your dairy-aire and ride the explosion on up. Unfortunately, the Orion spewed out so much radiation that it just wasn't a feasible launch option. If we want commuter trips to space, we're going to have to find another way. Well, it turns out that NASA's been doing quite a bit of research on Gas Core Nuclear Rockets, an ultra-powerful nuclear rocket that puts out almost no radiation. This research has spurred a fascinating new generation of ideas on reaching the cosmos. Could inexpensive cruises to the moon happen within our lifetimes?"
Space Elevator. Everything else is too dangerous and expensive.
One of the biggest problems with anything Nulcear, be it power, subs, or rockets, there is a very negative public perception. You can tell people that it is safe all you want but there will always be that paranoia. It doesn't help that people don't neccesarily trust the government.
A few years back, I remember there being some amazingly loud protests from some anti-nuclear power folks about the dangers of a deep space probe going up with a nuclear power source. Those folks were worried about the danger if the rocket blew up on the pad or the 1 in 100,000 or so chance the probe would hit the earth on one of its acceleration orbits.
Just imagine how happy these folks will be with a nuclear powered rocket, even if the scientific community claims that they are safe. After all, it's nuclear related, so it's gotta be bad!! (tongue firmly in cheek)
Quick, someone ban the sun.
And stop people from living in Denver or flying on planes or going skiing in the mountains.
And let's not forget xray machines, cathode ray tubes (TVs and computer monitors to you non-engineers).
And what about that deadly substance known as "granite" that releases radioactive radon?
But unfortunately, the space elevator will be so obscenely expensive in terms of resources and labour to get going in the first place that though amortized over a large number of launches, the cost would indeed be low... they probably won't be willing to wait that long to recover their costs, so launches that way would be even more expensive than the methods we use currently.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Could inexpensive cruises to the moon happen within our lifetimes?"
No.
See, here's the problem:
Nothing is permitted any more without a "business case" being made for it. No document, no invention, no idea, no presentation is countenanced unless it has 20% annual growth and the accountants and the management committee sign off on it.
Since it is impossible to get a bureaucracy to sign off on anything, nothing is permitted at all.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs are starved for capital. Large businesses and management committees have substantial capital, but refuse to invest it. Therefore, there is no capital; or, if there is, it is usually totally inadequate.
Middle management has a perfect series of questions for ideas like this. There is nothing in the world easier than criticizing an idea. Questions like "what do we need that for?" and "yeah, but how do you know it will work?" or "how can you be sure that will sell?" These questions are asked as if an answer is expected. The questions are followed by the comments: "It'll never work," and "sounds expensive" and "why can't we just use $OTHER_IDEA?"
But no answer is expected. The people asking the questions simply want to see how well the "idea person" can ad lib and how many bullshit one-liners and jokes they can reply with. After the middle managers have been entertained, a cocktail party laugh will circle the room, and the idea person will be escorted out of the building and into obscurity as the five-foot-wide-asses return to their bean salads.
As long as this continues, the rate of invention and "innovation" will be reduced to unmeasurably small levels. No vision, idea or invention can surmount well-funded cynicism. Brilliant, well-educated people's minds are being wasted because they report to lying, cheat fuck, greed-driven managers.
Middle management routinely turns its back on paying customers and competition-less markets. How the fuck are they ever going to accept a new "unproven" idea?
They won't.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
"Could inexpensive cruises to the moon happen within our lifetimes?"
My hope is that advances in medicine will extend my life to 150+ years so I can see more of these things come to pass.
As far as I can see the glass is supposed to not absorb the 80GW of light, yet the hydrogen is. Is the author claiming that silca glass absorbs less photons than hydrogen? If it absorbed only 0.01% of the total photons it would still get 8MW of heat, which is going to be quite hard to keep cool. For comparison, the optics used in cameras absorb 0.1% of the incoming photons.
On the other hand, hydrogen doesn't strike me as particularly absorbent. I thought it was mostly transparent except for a few frequencies (the hydrogen bands). As the gas reactor is acting as a purely blackbody radiator it's going to emit in a classical SB distribution, which will mean that most photons are going to just bounce around until they get absorbed by the mirror or glass.
So the obvious problem to me (and let's face it, I'm not a rocket scientist..) is that you have an 'impedance mismatch' between your energy source and your energy sink.