New Nuclear-powered Spaceship Design Revealed

Iddo Genuth writes "A U.S. based company introduced an innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months) and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling. The system, which may dramatically affect interplanetary space travel is called the Miniature Magnetic Orion (Mini-Mag Orion for short), and is an optimization of the 1958 Orion interplanetary propulsion concept."

Comments

That's nothing..

[QuantumG]

I've developed an improvement to William Gibson's design of the neural interface so that you can't be killed by ICE.

It's about as impressive as this announcement.

Re:That's nothing..

[cduffy]

That's unfair. Gibson's "design" was loose speculation, whereas hard math has been done both on the original Orion and on this potential improvement.

Certainly, neither of them has existed in practice -- but one was wild speculation, whereas the other had (and has) actual engineering.

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, quit your bickering you two

We can argue on slashdot all we want but what's The Difference.... Engine

Re:That's nothing..

[AKAImBatman]

Reading the (now Slashdotted) article, it sounds like this design came directly out of research done into antimatter catalyzed micro-fission. ACMF is a well-proven technology that uses minuscule amounts of antimatter to kickstart or enhance a fission reaction. Because the technology was fairly straightforward and had good returns for antimatter quantities that are reasonable to produce, NASA was funding research into an engine called ICAN.

I remember that there was some talk of actually launching a small probe based on the concept, but apparently the plan was scrapped. (Probably to help fund manned space travel.) Whatever antimatter confinement technologies they were working on may have led to the development of this new magnetic confinement fission technology. Or it could just be a coincidence.

Either way, nuclear technology of this sort is fairly well developed and is not a pipe dream. At least not from an engineering standpoint. Getting the risk adverse US Government and NASA to actually build one of the many known-quantity engines we have on hand is a completely different ball of wax. They're still trying to get us reliable LEO access (Thank God for Griffin is all I can say), so I doubt we'll be seeing any advanced engines in practice until the CEV/Orion project enters its third phase.

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about as impressive as this announcement. Do you mean the part where they said "The spacecraft itself will only have to carry a relatively small amount of fissionable material as fuel and will be able to reach speeds of approximately 10% of the speed of light."

I have a hard time believing that. I'd have to see their calculations. If true then this technology could make interstellar spacecraft possible (sorry only robots with at least 50 year travel times for now).

Re:That's nothing..

[Rei]

Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion. They only call it a successor to Orion because most people are familiar with Orion.

Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa. Medusa reverses the Orion design, having a parachute in front towing the craft, and detonating the explosives in front of the parachute. It uses structures in tension instead of compression (lighter), it allows the explosions to be further from the craft (less radiation), allows a longer acceleration stroke (smoother acceleration), and captures a larger percentage of the explosive energy.

Re:That's nothing..

[donaldm]

Even if this craft can reach speeds of 10% the speed of light we would still be limited to interplanetary exploration and exploitation (human nature dictates this). As far as interstellar travel goes it would still take about 45 years to send a spacecraft to the nearest star, not to mention the 4.5 year transmission delay. Still interplanetary travel is a big breakthrough if this article can be believed.

The real breakthrough would be an interstellar spacecraft (the realm of Science Fiction at the moment) and this would really open up our galaxy, however a person would have to live for thousands of years to visit each solar system in our galaxy for just one day even assuming travel between each solar system is almost instantaneous. Think "Star gate technology. Well I did say in the realm of Science Fiction :-)

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should we send one person to explore the lot ? Use the wonders of exponential growth. Send 100 ships with the means to travel and build ships them selves. In no time at all ... say a few thousand years we will have infested the whole galaxy.

Giorgis

Re:That's nothing..

[m50d]

Even if this craft can reach speeds of 10% the speed of light we would still be limited to interplanetary exploration and exploitation (human nature dictates this). As far as interstellar travel goes it would still take about 45 years to send a spacecraft to the nearest star, not to mention the 4.5 year transmission delay.

That's not am impossible obstacle. If the will was there, we could colonize the galaxy with current technology.

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

there is only one solar system, the one based on Sol... there are other star systems. Have a Nice Day!

Re:That's nothing..

[Gr8Apes]

Neat concept, except I don't think I want the nuclear explosion to be between the "sail" and my ship. Especially when the addition of a small nuclear reactor to the ship for power appears to have had noticeable effect on performance.

Another issue is the fact that this is a mechanically complicated system (tether that has a winch to play out during the pulse and retracted post pulse. That's a recipe for multiple failure possibilities. It would be more reliable if it were on something like a crankshaft that would use simple circular motion to control the linear motion, yet both of those are far more complicated than the relatively static system of Orion.

Re:That's nothing..

[Firethorn]

detonating the explosives in front of the parachute

Actually, from looking at the site, it detonates the explosive behind the 'parachute', between the ship and the chute.

It doesn't make sense any other way.

Still, you are indeed free to have miles and miles of cable, at which point the radiation striking the craft would be minimized, and at those lengths the cable doesn't need much stretch at all to give the necessary flex.

Re:That's nothing..

[Firethorn]

Why not use springs along the tether?

I initially missed the fact that they proposed using a winch. Still, a winch is known technology, and they could have multiple ones for backup purposes.

Design them so they fail open, and the computer simply tightens the remaining ones as necessary to compensate.

Heck, use the initial accelleration phase of the chute to provide power by 'regenerative braking' to provide power to the ship, IE you're making use of the energy differential between the speed of the chute and the ship. You then spend some of it in the reeling in of the chute back to it's original position.

Re:That's nothing..

[Stefanwulf]

but one was wild speculation, whereas the other had (and has) actual engineering.

Check out http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vision.html. The artificial vision system comes complete with a jack in the side of the head and everything. Dobelle even received a Nobel prize nomination for his work, and at least in scientific fields those are tough to get without doing the hard math :)

Re:That's nothing..

[Gr8Apes]

Actually, substituting an electrical braking/rail type system is a much better idea than any winch system as it would be much less likely to break. For a probe this might be fine, but for moving people, I'd think there's still some issues.

Re:That's nothing..

[Rei]

You want to talk about chance of component failures, what do you think having to have a compression-stroke system would be like? Tension is much easier to handle.

Lighter craft, more thrust, and less need for shielding and damping = many fewer explosions for the same level of acceleration.

Re:That's nothing..

[oliderid]

I guess I will sound like a monster but anyway:
What is the point to send human beings in their current form into deep space?
Our body is strictly unadapted for such a journey. It is fragile, it requires highly complex maintenance and it needs a strict environment. Common stuffs in space like gamma ray, radiation and all are lethal.

I guess the most reasonnable things for the future generations will be to design a body totally adapted to space and ready to survive such a long period.

Re:That's nothing..

[Gilmoure]

There was actually a scale model of Orion, that worked with conventional explosives, to test the pulse/explosive thrust concept. From the pictures I've seen, it looks to be 25'-30' tall. I don't think it went more than 50' up but they proved the concept.

Ever since reading FootFall, I've wanted to see (from a long ways off), an Orion take off. Hell, I'm surprised someone hasn't animated it yet, for some cheesy anime.

Re:That's nothing..

[Gilmoure]

Stick your head in a jar and send it off. You don't need to actually land on the planets out there, just launch the terraformers and wait a few thousand years until it's time to defrost the dna and start growing yourself some colonists. Once they're up and running, you have your own little world, ruled by 'the big giant head'.

Brilliant!

Re:That's nothing..

[dwye]

> Orion has already been obsoleted by a similar (but much more
> effective) design using normal-sized nuclear explosions -- Medusa.

1) Given that neither exists, it is a bit hard to say that Orion "has been", rather than "may be", obsoleted. Bang-bang was tested in scale models using dynamite sticks rather than A bombs, and performed well, whereas Medusa is still just a gedanken experiment.

2) Medusa cannot lift off from the Earth's surface, and THAT is the difficult part. Now, I do think that there are probably ways other than setting off the first couple nukes in the atmosphere to get the fully fueled spacecraft into orbit, but until they are tested they remain just ideas, not practice. Economical ways, that is. Obviously it could be done with heavy chemical rockets, and just as obviously, it cannot be, due to cost, unless you have a Dinosaur Killer coming at you and cost no longer matters (in which case, Orion still beats Medusa launched conventionally).

> Still, this has very little to do with Orion apart from them both being nuclear pulse propulsion.

Agreed. This looks to be more like Daedelus, the British Interplanetary Society design from the late 1970s, except used in-system rather than interstellar.

Re:That's nothing..

[Firethorn]

That's kinda what I was picturing. A series of electric motors/generators hooked to the cable, able to pull it back in, push it out, or act as a generator to slow it down. All controlled by a computer.

The only real 'winch' would be at the back, to ensure that the cable feeds in/out properly.

Re:That's nothing..

[bryguy5]

Sounds kind of familar you could be "The head". What a great way to run a colony or research institute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the effect of the radiation on the parachute and its tethers?
  The Orion has the advantage that an oil can be sprayed over the surface of the pusher plate and it will not ablate at all, and being made of a very heavy material (uranium is often posited, since you can use it at a destination as fuel for a nuclear reactor) there's a LOT of matter to soak up the radiation.
  With something thin and lightweight like the Medusa parachute+ropes design, you'd have to worry that the structural integrity of the materials would be compromised as radiation from the blasts continually struck it, breaking atomic bonds and sometimes transmuting elements within the structure.
  Be a shame if your parachute eroded and snapped off after a while.

Re:That's nothing..

[Gilmoure]

I was thinking of 3rd Rock From The Sun. The same thing happened to me!

Re:That's nothing..

[nschubach]

The most important thing in this system though is the manual override. It has to be a concealed lever about four times the size of the human hand and you have to enter a special 4 digit code into a control panel with no labels. You get extra points for requiring that two people need to pull it and by placing it in a crawlspace no bigger than a human and a half. Only then will it be space worthy.

Re:That's nothing..

[Rei]

My notion of "front" was different than yours :) I generally consider the "front" of a chute to be the concave side -- the side that you see when looking at it when tethered to it.

Re:That's nothing..

[Rei]

Doesn't matter if the parachute erodes. So what if you get holes in it? As long as it's a ripstop design, there's no problem. It's not like some sort of sieve where all of the water will leak out. All that matters is the integrity of the tethers, and you can make those as strong as you want.

The weight of Orion is precisely the problem. Lots of weight means bad acceleration and unreasonable cost to build/launch. Not to mention, that weight is located immediately behind your crew, which means that you have to shield, which means even more weight, as well as "jolting" acceleration.

Re:That's nothing..

[Rei]

Orion can't lift off from Earth's surface realistically. Nobody would ever allow that; the scale of contamination would be too huge. Just from our (limited) atomic testing, we already increased Earth's background radiation and modified atmospheric isotopic ratios to the point that objects from the 1950s to present (and well off into the future) won't ever be able to be reliably carbon dated.

Even still, how exactly is detonations beneath the craft somehow more doable than detonations above it? As though we can't hold a craft up by its chute in no fewer than a hundred different ways, just like we could hold Orion up so that there's airspace beneath its pusher plate? In fact, having the chute aloft makes it much easier (if it's high enough that the atmosphere is thinner), because a spacecraft designed to be propelled by nuclear explosions in space will be poorly designed to tolerate atmospheric nuclear explosions. In space, almost all of the force of the blast is radiation. The radiation spreads out for obscene distances at great intensity. Here on Earth, much of that radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, making tremendous atmospheric heat that causes the huge shocks/blast waves that contain the energy of the explosion. Very, very different situations. Really, I don't see how any sort of craft designed for space operation with such a system would function at all in the atmosphere. And this isn't even considering gamma scattering, which would be a problem for Orion (not for Medusa, due to the long stroke length keeping the explosion far from the main body). Both systems would pose huge EMP problems.

The facts are that from a design standpoint, Medusa beats Orion on pretty much every front, from ISP to system mass to radiation exposure to reliability, to smoothness of acceleration, and so on down the line. Not just by a little, but by orders of magnitude. Just because there was some preliminary (and very limited) work on Orion in the 50s/60s doesn't change that it is a vastly inferior design. Orion is stuck in the old "rocket" mentality; they made it look like a rocket, with the weight on top and the thrust in back. That's not an optimal design in this case.

Re:That's nothing..

[peacefinder]

Yeah, either one would really have to be constructed in orbit - and probably pushed out of the magnetosphere - before moving out under their own power. Anything else is not politically possible even if the engineering worked.

Re:That's nothing..

[Anonymous Coward]

Antiprotons are readily produced using particle accelerators (Fermilab can produce 1e07 per second). Production is energy-intensive, however. Unfortunately, the resulting antiprotons tend to be very hot, so magnetic confinement is also energy-intensive. Decelerating hot antiprotons is also very energy-intensive. Consequently, antiprotons are very expensive-to-produce energy stores.

Cold positrons are easy to come by via a variety of nuclear fission reactions, and easy to confine, but are also poor stores of energy compared to the radioisotopes that produced them.

The effectiveness of antimatter as an energy store needs to be weighed (pun intended) against the cost of accelerating the mass to escape velocity.

Spacecraft have the virtue of operating in an environment with very low friction and very low gravitational acclerration, so tiny forces are useful for propulsion. Spacecraft (or component parts) are also so expensive to lift into space -- and the cost is almost entirely due to their total mass -- that trading much greater cost of production per unit mass for much greater acceleration per unit mass is worthwhile.

Antimatter is only attractive because lifting mass into space is expensive. The energy stored per unit of mass in antimatter-matter pairs is several orders of magnitude greater than anything else (e.g., it's at least two orders greater than proton-proton nuclear fusion, six or more greater than transuranic nuclear fission, and ten greater than chemical reactions).

The same logic drives the use of radioisotope thermoelectric generators fuelled by ludicrously expensive (per gram) 238Pu in spacecraft. However, antiparticles are several orders of magnitude more expensive per mass unit than reactor-bred radioisotopes, and currently the savings due to lowered mass does not favour the use of antimatter. Moreover, plausible production scale of antimatter is too small.

An ACMF process would use much less antimatter than a pure annihilation system, and also much less fissile-fertile radioisotope than a pure fission or fission-fusion system. There is a secondary efficiency gain from the ability to produce a small multistage explosion (annihilation, fission, fusion) that is not achievable with conventional fission-starting reactions.

In a conventional fission/fission-fusion system one would physically move two or more subcritical quantities of fissile material close together to create a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. Alternatively one could use a particle accelerator to knock neutrons out a suitable target and into a subcritical quantity of fissile material, causing a self-sustaining fission chain reaction.

Most feasible ACMF processes are more like the second approach, and so require anti-tritium or anti-deuterium (nuclei) rather than just antiprotons. A T/anti-T reaction between the proton and antiproton will carry away most of the annihilation energy in neutrinos and gamma rays, but will also transfer a great deal of kinetic energy into the neutrons, which can be used to trigger fission in a subcritical pile.

Some ACMF processes rely upon an electromagnetic capture of an antiproton by a normal-matter fissile ion. Unlike electron capture, antiproton capture is not stable and results in the release of highly enegetic gamma rays prior to the ultimate antiproton-proton annihilation, which rips apart the nucleus imparting enough kinetic energy to the nucleons to trigger fission and possibly fusion reactions in nearby matter.

The key question lies in whether it is easier to manufacture a store of cold antiprotons or a store of cold anti-T/anti-D. It may be easier to produce cold but fully reduced anti-H/anti-D/anti-T then strip away the positrons to enable electromagnetic confinement, and there are some fission fine tuning advantages to this approach. Today, however, the reverse is usually true -- positrons and antiprotons are acquired separately and then combined into atomic antihydrogen.

The princip

Didn't we

[scoot80]

recently have an article about trip to mars in a week? So.. this is really.. an inferior mode of transport for all those Mars holidayers...

Re:Didn't we

[blahdeblah2000]

Yep

http://dialog.newsedge.com/newsedge.asp?site=2006121916143901110346&block=folderstory&briefs=off&action=XMLStoryResult&smd=true&storyid=p0906509.2rw&rtcrdata=off

Also same site was touting anti-matter proplusion last year http://www.tfot.info/articles/33/new-antimatter-engine-design.html

Also - do we really want to do fission - its so 20th century and dangerous - news today - The UK has built up a stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium - enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7006056.stm

Re:Didn't we

[scoot80]

Hmm well, maybe someone ought to take a leaf out of Professor Farnsworth's book and design a ship which doesn't move, the universe moves around it. Now, that is headline news!

Re:Didn't we

[SleptThroughClass]

enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs

OK, so the UK could deliver entire buildings to Mars.

Re:Didn't we

[Rakishi]

Yes but the energy required by it to do that could have probably cooked a continent. So I'm sure they'd be too busy working for the DoD to have time to help out the Mars holidayers.

hopefully

[weirdcrashingnoises]

Hopefully this spaceship will be able to slow down before it reaches mars.

Unlike some spaceships... http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/13/2328233

Re:hopefully

[Tablizer]

Hopefully this spaceship will be able to slow down before it reaches mars.

Um, oh oh
        -NASA-

Re:hopefully

[moderatorrater]

What makes you think the photonic drive wouldn't be able to slow down? Does the drive not work if you flip the ship in the opposite direction?

Re:hopefully

[ILuvRamen]

that's your biggest worry? What ever happened to "we'll never make a nuclear powered anything to go into space because if it blows up after it launches it will spread nuclear material through the atmosphere and cause a mild nuclear winter and radioactive rain" thing I learned in school? It can crash into Mars all it wants as long as it clears out atmosphere without killing us all

Re:hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that would be a good idea.

Re:hopefully

[NeoTron]

Look, really, where do people like you get your concepts of space travel from?

You were probably trying to be humorous, but, really! Lookee here;

1) Start your trip from Earth Orbit, by firing up them engines and transferring into a nice trajectory to our friendly-neighborhood planet Mars.
2) ???
3) Profit!... no, I mean, half-way through the journey (or actually, just a little bit before half way, to give some leeway for properly transferring into a Mars orbital path), switch off them engines!
4) Swing your craft around so that the pointy-end is towards the trajectory's rear and the business end (the engines) are pointing towards the trajectory's forward path.
5) Fire up them engines again! Hey presto! You're now slowing down.
6) Transfer into a Mars orbit.
7) ???
8) Profit!

Re:hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously hope they never actually taught that to you in school. Because if they did, your teacher should be fired.

Re:hopefully

[Propaganda13]

1) Start your trip from Earth Orbit, by firing up them engines and transferring into a nice trajectory to our friendly-neighborhood planet Mars.
2) ???
3) Profit!... no, I mean, half-way through the journey (or actually, just a little bit before half way, to give some leeway for properly transferring into a Mars orbital path), switch off them engines!
4) Swing your craft around so that the pointy-end is towards the trajectory's rear and the business end (the engines) are pointing towards the trajectory's forward path.
5) Fire up them engines again! Hey presto! You're now flying into nuclear explosions!
6) ???

fixed

Re:hopefully

[NeoTron]

Haha!

Except, you're not :)

Re:hopefully

[icebrain]

It would work just fine... that is, assuming it works at all. The photon drive has a little problem; namely, it requires about 300 megawatts of power to produce a Newton of thrust... and that's at 100% efficiency.

The Orion concept is much more technically feasable, barring any massive breakthroughs in materials and fusion power.

Re:hopefully

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no privileged frame of reference...

Re:hopefully

[Goaway]

There is absolutely nothing in the article you linked about not being able to slow down. It seems infeasible for a number of reasons, but that is not one of them.

Or perhaps you have some information indicating otherwise?

Re:hopefully

[FSWKU]

Except that all motion is relative. Imagine you are travelling in the same path at the same velocity as the ship (nevermind having to be able to breathe in a vacuum, be immune to nuclear explosions, etc) a short distance away. You are both travelling at the same speed, so the ship is sitting still as far as you're concerned. When the explosions begin again, you won't be changing velocity, but the ship WILL. Therefore, the ship will be moving AWAY from you. Same thing with the explosions. Also the same reason why the space shuttle isn't flying into it's own engine exhaust when it does a de-orbit burn (and is "flying" backwards).

Re:hopefully

[ILuvRamen]

that's funny because it was on a discovery channel show too. They took minutes to explain why nobody has built a nuclear powered rocket

Re:hopefully

[gstoddart]

It would work just fine... that is, assuming it works at all. The photon drive has a little problem; namely, it requires about 300 megawatts of power to produce a Newton of thrust... and that's at 100% efficiency.

*laugh* And here I thought governments were inefficient. :-P

Cheers

Re:hopefully

[Minwee]

6) Go back to school. Go directly to school. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
7) Learn about strange new concepts like Galilean Relativity, Newton's Laws of Motion and Inertial Frames of Reference.
7a) And no, I'm not going to link you to Wikipedia's articles on those. You're going to have to go with step six for that.
8) Now that you understand why step five is no different from step one, you can figure out what step six was supposed to be.
9) For extra credit, write "I will not talk out of my ass about Physics" 6x10^24 times on the chalkboard.

Re:hopefully

[nutshell42]

1) Start your trip from Earth Orbit, by firing up them engines and transferring into a nice trajectory to our friendly-neighborhood planet Mars.
2) ???
3) Profit!... no, I mean, half-way through the journey (or actually, just a little bit before half way, to give some leeway for properly transferring into a Mars orbital path), switch off them engines!
4) Swing your craft around so that the pointy-end is towards the trajectory's rear and the business end (the engines) are pointing towards the trajectory's forward path.
5) Fire up them engines again! Hey presto! You're now flying into nuclear explosions!
6) ???
7) Hulk Smash!

Re:hopefully

[RexRhino]

Spacecrafts don't have to "slow down" before they reach Mars. They use a transfer orbit.

Re:hopefully

[Propaganda13]

1. It's a joke.

Also unless the magnetic nozzle is able to direct 100% of the energy, parts of the explosion are still hitting the ship hence flying into an explosion.

Nice idea but...

[click2005]

The use of nuclear power in space is banned by treaty.

Re:Nice idea but...

[hedwards]

A treaty is only as good as the signatories. There is no particular reason why the signatories couldn't write and sign a new treaty that just specified that there were to be no nuclear powered satellites in orbit or nuclear weapons in space.

As that is more or less the intent. A spaceship that was nuclear powered would really only be an issue if it was allowed to orbit the earth long enough to fall out of orbit.

Re:Nice idea but...

[Jarik C-Bol]

no, nuclear weapons in space are banned by treaty. we use nuclear power in the form of nuclear batterys in space all the time. mostly because they can stand up to the temprature extremes of space, and will outlast the hardware they are installed in. (Vs a alkaline or some other form of battery, which does not have these properties.)

Re:Nice idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russians use nuclear reactors on various satelites not just RTGs. Like Cosmos 954 that came down in northern Canada. Or one leaking sodium coolant resulting in thousands of droplets now orbiting the earth like bullets to take out other satelites or spacecraft.

Re:Nice idea but...

[GreggBz]

The use of nuclear weapons is banned, yes.

There has been research into nuclear rockets (NERVA), and nuclear power sources.

Project Prometheus shows promise. Already, most of the long range probes that NASA has use radioactive decay as a power source, which is pretty safe and reliable.

Re:Nice idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have broken every treaty we have ever signed. Treaties don't apply to the good ol' US of A.

If we want anything, we grab it, and kill whoever gets in the way.

We're the GOOD guys. Everyone else is shit.

Re:Nice idea but...

[SnarfQuest]

Ummm, haven't there been numerous nuclear powered space craft already?

Those probes to Jupiter and beyond had nuclear batterys (voyager). Alien machine intelligences will eventually find them, mispronounce their name, and bring them back here to mate with Captain Kirk.

I remember a big to-do about a plutonium powered probe that was doing a flyby past Earth. There was a lot of noise about how, if it burned up in the atmosphere, the plutonium would scatter across the earth, killing everything. The news media reporting that it was scientifically proven that one single atom of plutonium falling to Earth would instantly kill 100 people a day, for the next 100,000 years. They are never wrong, are they?

Re:Nice idea but...

[Anonymous Coward]

>long enough to fall out of orbit. heh-heh "fall out" heh, heh

jupiter?

[farkus888]

Jupiter in a year is great but how long does it take to get to Uranus?

Re:jupiter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like all things to do with space travel, it depends on how much you're willing to pay

Re:jupiter?

[moosesocks]

Obligatory:

Fry: Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus. (laughs)
Leela: I don't get it.
Professor: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Professor: Urectum.

Re:jupiter?

[Samari711]

Hey, getting to Jupiter is important. We're already behind schedule for finding the Monoliths

speaking of revealing...

[Anonymous Coward]

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Oh you thought it was so great when I spread my ass for him, when he licked and sucked and drooled in my butt, when he made me cum like a slutty little whore. You begged him for pictures of me. Just because I posed for Penthouse years ago does not mean I want you seeing me now. I'm a completely different person. Some of you felt I deserved it because I allowed my son to kiss me and fondle me a little earlier. I was drunk, I missed my dead husband. John looks just like his father at 16; the age that I met and fell in love with him. He took me out to the Paladin Club for a special dinner, just like my husband used to. For a little while the alcohol, my loneliness and the fond memories of that place combined and it felt like my loving husband was with me again. For a little while I responded to my son as if he were my husband. From his filthy story that he published via Webtv, I learned that was his plan all along.

While it is true that was a mistake, it does not change one simple fact. I said NO! I begged him to stop. Even if a woman makes out with you a little, even if she feels a guy's butt through his pants, that does not mean she has to have sex with him. I have the right not to be fucked up the ass by my son. No means NO. One year ago my son took something precious away from me. He took my ability to trust myself, my judgement.

I mean if I am too stupid to realize that my only son is lusting after me for weeks, that he is committed to raping his mother - who can I trust? This last year has been a shit-storm. I have tried to forget and forgive my son. But when I saw that he used that fucking WEBTV to tell the whole world what he did, that there was no shame, no remorse - I feel the anger begin to bubble up in me. When I think how many of you took pleasure in my rape, how many of you beat your tiny little pricks in glee at my humiliation, at the worst thing that has ever happened to me - I want revenge. Yes John took something precious from me; but this Christmas I'm taking it back.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I did not come to the decision to rape and humiliate my son easily. I want you to understand that. The period immediately after my rape was very difficult. I could not bring myself to call the police on my only son, to humiliate myself further by letting the whole world know what a fool I was, what a sick prick I had for a son. I was so scared. Imagine sleeping every night with a rapist in your house. You try taking a shower knowing your rapist is just a few yards away. You're naked, wet and defenceless and you hear a floor board creek, or was it the bathroom door opening? For two months I barricaded my door every night, and slept in fear of a second rape. It never came.

At Valentine's day I found my 16 yr old son crying in the kitchen. I was still his mother. No matter how angry I was at him.

"John, what's wrong, why are you crying."

"Oh mom(sniffle), I just realized that you are never going to forgive me for what I did. You don't love me any more. With Dad and Grandma dead, I have nobody. Mom I didn't really rape you. I just needed you so bad, I kind of pressured you until you surrendered that incredible ass to me. I know it was wrong, that it was a mistake. But mom, wasn't it wrong for you to make out with me and squeeze my ass while we were dancing? Look - all I'm saying is we would both handle things differently if we could reli

What about the surging nature of the propuslion?

[Kaenneth]

An WHUMP Orion WHUMP based WHUMP drive WHUMP can WHUMP be a WHUMP bit WHUMP rough, WHUMP any WHUMP study WHUMP on the WHUMP effects WHUMP on cargo/passWHUMPengers?

What about manned?

[Tanman]

speeding up via riding the wave of successive explosions is great for an unmanned craft. For a manned craft, though, I have a couple questions:

1. How will people deal with the psychological effect of the never-ending pounding brought by this type of propulsion?

2. Will scientists avoid this issue by instead strapping people into some kind of suspension and using a fewer number of larger explosions to get up-to-speed per day?

3. What effect would that have on a person physically? We know people can take X G's, but what about being subjected to constant hits like that. If they are stronger, it could have some as-yet unforseen effect on our physiology.

Re:What about manned?

[flyingfsck]

How do deal with all those explosions in your car engine?

Re:What about manned?

[Tanman]

If you can't tell the difference between explosions contained in an internal combustion engine to power the drive shaft vs. being moved forward by the actual explosions, then I can't help you.

Re:What about manned?

[Fox_1]

1. lot of explosions in a car engine, and we're all mostly still sane. Seriously though they are small contained explosions (couple grams of material) that vent plasma, there is no reason why people in the passenger compartment would even be aware of each individual explosion. The point is that these are nuclear weapon sized explosions, but many smaller ones providing relatively constant thrust. It won't be jerky.

2. I don't know if you understand how acceleration works. But Fewer larger explosions would make for a rougher ride. And you don't get up to speed on a day to day basis, that would be a weird way to fly a space craft.

3. 1 g constant acceleration for a few hours is pretty freaking fast. This engine could do the thrust of the space shuttle - which is more then 1 g, but why would you do 12 g for more then a few minutes?
If you do 1g acceleration for a full day you are going about After 1 day, you are going 800,000 m/s - 800km/sec or 288,000 km/hour mars is about 78million km away - so you can see how this is going, if you stop accelerating at this speed it's about a 4 or 5 million km a day just coasting, or 20 or so days to get there. So it's silly to do more then 1g acceleration, unless you are leaving a planets surface and need to reach escape velocity. So no worries about weird physical effects from the acceleration - now long term zero g is a whole'nother type of problem, but again no need to make it a long trip with this kind of power.

Re:What about manned?

[sssssss27]

What's the difference? An internal combustion engine is coupled directly from the explosion all the way to the road, well at least in a manual car. The reason you don't feel each explosion though is that instead of using one big one there are thousands of tiny ones so it seems like a smooth motion.

Re:What about manned?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If you can't tell the difference between explosions contained in an internal combustion engine to power the drive shaft vs. being moved forward by the actual explosions, then I can't help you.

You're missing the point. The explosions in your car happen very very fast, and the bulk of the vehicle absorbs most of the shock; with the combination of these two effects, you don't perceive them as explosions. Ditto for an Orion drive. As an intermediate case, consider a pulsejet, which is "moved forward by the actual explosions" in much the same way. Pulsejets were incredibly unpleasant to fly, but that had more to do with the engine being mounted near the pilot than with the propulsion technology itself -- and of course you wouldn't mount an Orion drive right next to a human crew anyway, or they'd have a lot worse things than vibration to worry about.

Re:What about manned?

[Tablizer]

1. How will people deal with the psychological effect of the never-ending pounding brought by this type of propulsion?

Explains...why...Kirk...talked...like...this. The...future...is...here.

Re:What about manned?

[DigiShaman]

A four, six, and eight cylinder engine will have their pistons out of phase from each other as to provide a continuous and smooth power curve. Now compare that with a single piston engine (lawn mower, weed eater...etc) and take notice of the excessive vibration. Even though the crank shaft has counter weights, it's the interleaving of the detonations (and flywheel) that provides smooth motion.

Re:What about manned?

[Duhavid]

There is also the flywheel, which dampens the effect of each combustion event.

Also, it is not an explosion, but rapid combustion.

Further, the magnitude of the events is quite different
( in a car engine, the events are relatively small,
    on orion, well, bigger ).

Re:What about manned?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The linked article page is not coming up, but I think nuclear is being proposed to use nuclear fuels to superheat gasses for propulsion, so it could be a constant burn and not a series of explosions. At least it's not going to behave like a series of a-bombs, that's stupid.

Re:What about manned?

[Grond]

The full press release notes that the maximum acceleration would be a mere .6 G's or so, which is more than Mars but obviously less than Earth. This is unlikely to result in any unknown physiological changes. In fact, the at least occasional exposure to g-forces would probably be beneficial compared to continuous micro-gravity.

Anyway, a 100 metric ton craft would be pretty wimpy. That's 5% of the Space Shuttle's mass, for instance. I suspect this would be an unmanned mission. (For reference, the Apollo Service Module & Lunar Module together were about 40 metric tons and the longest Apollo missions only lasted 12 days).

Also, the 'ignition mass' for the fastest version would be a whopping 1300 metric tons of plutonium. Using uranium prices as a stand-in, that's about $300 million in fuel. That's an awful big price tag for just getting a larger probe to Mars faster.

Re:What about manned?

[fyoder]

I think many of your concerns would be addressed by the addition of an inertial compensator. As the wikipedia article points out, this may not fully protect against sudden shocks. It also seems less effective on people suffering from HPD (hamminess personality disorder), who may be thrown about much more violently than people less drama prone.

Re:What about manned?

[modecx]

Isn't it kinda sad that people on a site which is supposedly for nerds can't naturally grasp the idea of waves, pulse-width, modulation, duty cycle, and psychophysical thresholds?

Exactly what kind of nerds are they cranking out these days?

Re:What about manned?

[astrotek]

thanks for the laugh

Re:What about manned?

[zippthorne]

"Dampen" doesn't mean what you think it means. Or rather, it wouldn't if people would stop adding superfluous letters to seem more intelligent.

The word is damp. The infinitive is "to damp" and a device which damps is a damper. There's no need for the extra -en unless you want to have a confusing half-synonym for moisten.

On an orion, the pusher plate is connected to the main spacecraft body by shock absorbers. Quite similar to a gun recoil mechanism, I imagine, except that for manned flight it would spread the impulse out over a much longer time period. Timed just right, occupants of a habitat at the top of the structure would experience constant acceleration.

The main problem with Orion is that it doesn't solve a problem that exists. It has less Isp than some of the better electric propulsion options, and huge structure requirements. It is high thrust, high Isp, so it's main use would be getting off the planet, but its nature contraindicates ever being used within the atmosphere.

Re:What about manned?

[a_nonamiss]

Should we be worried that you seem to know so much about the price of Plutonium? ;)

Re:What about manned?

[Archades54]

I guess the way females deal with sitting on washing machines.....by having a blast.

Re:What about manned?

[Duhavid]

According to dictionary.com, the first reference on "dampen"
is to moisten. The secondary one is "to dull, deaden, depress,
restrain". I thought it was pretty obvious that that is the
one I meant, but I can see that there is another meaning.
Thank you for the correction.

On Orion, yes, I knew that there would be shock absorbers,
spreading the impulse out, but there will still be a huge
difference in timing, magnitude, and direction between
an infernal combustion engine and an Orion.

Re:What about manned?

[PitaBred]

It's now more popular to be a nerd, rather than just a state of being for people who are truly drawn to it, so you start getting a lot of wannabe's who can't hack it intellectually, but are still drawn to the "lifestyle", or more the perks of being known as a nerd. For example, look at Apple users ;)

Re:What about manned?

[Tanman]

An internal combustion engine is storing energy in a spinning flywheel. The spinning flywheel is what provides power to the wheels. This is incredibly important because the flywheel is not going to instantly stop when there is not an explosion taking place - it has stored energy to keep it spinning so that it can drive the wheels.

With the orion drive, when there is no explosion going on, there is no propulsion. The explosion is driving the wheels directly, so to speak. The only way to possibly counteract this, as far as I my admitantly limited knowledge can guess, is to have a perfect-balanced shock system of some sort to absorb and slowly distribute the force of the explosion evenly until the exact moment of the next explosion. I'll play the ignorant guy, though, and say that I do not believe that system is feasible. Please show me an example of a working system. "This would have worked except" examples need not apply, because they didn't work.

Re:What about manned?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Explains...why...Kirk...talked...like...this

Ah, impulse power. I think early trekkies explained that as more of a Dean Drive (one that dumped half the inertia into a form of parallel-universe oubliette thingy) rather than the fusion "digit ships" of Footfall, which tended to buzz a bit. Some interesting speculative weaponry comes out of Niven/Pournelle books.

Re:What about manned?

[Nefarious Wheel]

It also seems less effective on people suffering from HPD (hamminess personality disorder), who may be thrown about much more violently than people less drama prone

Ah you might not mean Interial Compensator, but rather Heisenberg Compensator.

How do they work?

Re:What about manned?

[Peeteriz]

Actually, if it's thrust/weight is better than current chemical rockets, then, as you say, it would be good for getting off the planet - but Mars instead of Earth.
    A major problem in a Mars mission is the huge weight of the rocket needed to get up from Mars to orbit - since that rocket also needs to be raised up from Earth beforehand. Anything that can make Mars lander/launcher lighter is desperately needed, and who cares if we nuke a spot of Martian desert after we've analysed it already...

Re:What about manned?

[JockTroll]

"Exactly what kind of nerds are they cranking out these days?"

The same kind of loserboy nerds that have always been falling out the butt of society. Nerds are far from smart, intelligent or cultured: they only pretend to be. They take refuge in a lie, a made-up fantasy world in which they are the uber-intelligent, misunderstood, gifted elite.

The reality is different: nerds are mediocre when not downright stupid. They spend their time dabbling with computer "science" that they pretend is beyond the layman's capabilities while it's actually child's play. They read science books they cannot understand. They engage in pointless discussions on a thousand forums on the web, talking about stuff they don't know, commenting on the works of real scientists and philosophers whose greatness they can never hope to achieve.

We rightly despise nerds. We put them back in their place, which is heads down in the toilet bowl. We publicly humiliate them, we bash their heads against walls, we beat them up and shit on their faces. It would be far better to kill them but it's, for the moment, illegal to do so.

Re:What about manned?

[Anonymous Coward]

A four, six, and eight cylinder engine will have their pistons out of phase from each other as to provide a continuous and smooth power curve. Now compare that with a single piston engine (lawn mower, weed eater...etc) and take notice of the excessive vibration. Even though the crank shaft has counter weights, it's the interleaving of the detonations (and flywheel) that provides smooth motion.

No no no... You still have impulses, no matter how you interleave them. The trick is to have more and smaller impulses faster, instead of larger less frequent ones. With more cylinders you can prep them to fire closer to each other than you can with fewer (think, only 1/4 of the cycle generates power, the rest are used to prep the cylinder for another detonation). If you could make a single cylinder engine that could run at say 10000 rpm, yeh, I bet it would be alot smoother, the problem is they tend to fall apart from momentum of the piston getting flung back and forth, valves opening and closing, and slight imbalances in everything that spins, not to mention thermal effects and everything else.

With a device powered by bombs, all you gotta do is toss them out into the detonation chamber at a faster rate. Toss them out fast enough rate, and tune your dampers to the exact mass of your vehicle and rate of the impulse wave, and your vehicle will remain under almost constant power (especially with a high mass to force ratio). Just because they are nuclear explosions doesnt mean they have to be ginormous. FTFA:

The Mini-Mag system uses a magnetic field in order to trigger an explosion of compressed material in the form of small pellets weighing several grams. This explosion, although being significantly weaker than a nuclear explosion, creates plasma that is directed through a magnetic nozzle to generate vehicle thrust.

By using a rapid succession of small explosions, tuned damping between the vehicle and engine, and controlling the exhaust from the explosions by way of magnetic nozzle, you get a smooth ride.

Tm

Re:What about manned?

[Epsillon]

Ah you might not mean Inertial Compensator, but rather Heisenberg Compensator.

He (?) means inertial damper system, which is supposedly tied in with the ship's propulsion systems and the internal gravity generators but can't keep up with being hit by the Klingons on the starboard bow, allowing much hammy acting to take place, especially in TOS. The Heisenberg Compensator is a fictional part of the transporter system to counter Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that the transporter cannot extract certain pairs of full precision observable data simultaneously, including location and momentum of particles, precluding the energising and rematerialisation of matter in the manner postulated by the Trek universe.

They theoretically work in this manner: The annular confinement beam is established around the subject and a pattern is mapped, through the HC which compensates for the imprecision in observable data, to a pattern buffer as the matter is energised. This energy is then transferred through another externally generated ACB to the distant endpoint, where it is again converted to matter from the pattern stored in the buffer. The Heisenberg Compensator was included to stop comments like "It will never work" from pedants.

Unfortunately, it doesn't stop pedants like me from shouting at the screen when they beam Scotty and LaForge off the Jenolan (which is holding the exit hatch of a Dyson Sphere open) with the Jenolan's shields up in "Relics" and then proceed to destroy the Jenolan, still with its shields up, with a single photon torpedo. According to Trek canon, one cannot establish an ACB and pattern lock through a defensive shield with Federation technology, although it is conceivable that they dropped the (if I remember which way around the thing was facing) port side generators leaving fore and aft up. A possible case of SNAFU in an otherwise entertaining episode ("It is... it is... it is green" - Data, on Aldeberon Whisky. "N C C 1 7 0 1, no bloody A, B, C or D!" - Scotty, trying to get a copy of the old bridge running on the holodeck.)

Now I've been trolled into revealing my Trek geekiness and being a sad git, I'll go away ;-)

Re:What about manned?

[gravij]

"Dampen" doesn't mean what you think it means. Or rather, it wouldn't if people would stop adding superfluous letters to seem more intelligent.

The word is damp. The infinitive is "to damp" and a device which damps is a damper. There's no need for the extra -en unless you want to have a confusing half-synonym for moisten.
  Care to back that up? No source that I could find online supported your claim. All I found was this:
(from dict.die.net)
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Damp \Damp\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Damped; p. pr. & vb. n.
      Damping.] [OE. dampen to choke, suffocate. See Damp, n.]

      2. To put out, as fire; to depress or deject; to deaden; to
            cloud; to check or restrain, as action or vigor; to make
            dull; to weaken; to discourage.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Dampen \Damp"en\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Dampened; p. pr. & vb.
      n. Dampening.]

      2. To depress; to check; to make dull; to lessen.

Dampen \Damp"en\, v. i.
      To become damp; to deaden.

Re:What about manned?

[kaizokuace]

For example, look at Apple users ;)

apple users aren't nerds they are douches.

Re:What about manned?

[NeMon'ess]

If he owns a DeLorean he's my new best friend.

Re:What about manned?

[Liquid Len]

IIRC from Dyson's book, though, the damper was working as long as all bombs explode as planned. One dud was okay, but two consecutive duds would put the damper oscillation out of phase, which would induce huge stresses on the vessel structure resulting in its destruction. Two duds is not something which seems that unlikely to me.

Re:What about manned?

[enrevanche]

Dampen means exactly what he was trying to say. The infinitive of the verb he used is "to dampen". dampen

Re:What about manned?

[Tanman]

The bulk of the car is not what absorbs the explosions in an internal combustion engine. The energy of the explosions is stored by the rotation of the flywheel. This is why people can put a V8 on a (relatively) lightweight motorcycle and it still runs smoothly. The mass of the car has very little to do with it.

Burning Gasoline -> store power in flywheel "kinetic battery" -> distribute energy to driveshaft -> spin tires

The orion concept is based on

Explosion -> move ship forward. There is no flywheel because there would be nothing to apply the flywheel's energy against. The explosion must be directly responsible for moving the ship. So, they have to use what sounds to be a big recoil mechanism that is precision-tuned to release its energy in a completely linear method and over the exact time from when one explosion occurs to the next. Maybe they can do that, maybe they can't. My money is on "nope." Please give me an example where such a system has ever been successfully tested, and I will stand corrected. As you stated before, pulse jets were "incredibly unpleasant to fly," and as such I think you can agree it is not a shining example of our capability in creating a shock system such as this.

Re:What about manned?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong. You are also probably an American, which is why you are wrong.
(Americans seem, by far, to be the ones who mistake the way they learnt English for the only possible way to say something).

'Dampen' and 'dampener' (as in "to put a dampener on things", an incredibly common phrase in English) are both perfectly correct.

Guess what? American English is a minority of the English spoken and used worldwide. Commonwealth English (ie. established in British colonies) is used more widely, and includes the use of 'dampen' and 'dampener' as well as many other variations you are ignorant of.

This does not make them incorrect. This just means, that yet again, a sheltered American has to learn that the world extends beyond their little country.

Please learn something about the world beyond your borders and do something about your ignorance masquerading as knowledge. You do yourself, and everyone else, a disservice.

Re:What about manned?

[TheRaven64]

Using uranium prices as a stand-in, that's about $300 million in fuel. That's an awful big price tag for just getting a larger probe to Mars faster. For reference, it costs an average of $450 million to launch the space shuttle. The fuel for the trip to mars would be a lot less than the cost of getting it into orbit in the first place.

Re:What about manned?

[Ihlosi]

For reference, it costs an average of $450 million to launch the space shuttle.

... only a fraction of which is fuel costs. Even rocket fuel doesn't cost $538/gal.

Re:What about manned?

[jollyreaper]

1. How will people deal with the psychological effect of the never-ending pounding brought by this type of propulsion? Explains...why...Kirk...talked...like...this. The...future...is...here. Yeah, but you have to consider who he was pounding. Will the designers of this drive supply the passengers with their own green slave chicks?

Re:What about manned?

[Lumpy]

Simple.

after the cargo and the astronauts get loaded into the rocket in orbit, liquid jello is injected into the cabin and allowed to solidify. the cargo and crew are secure from all movement now as jello wiggles and keeps the fruit inside stable.

sie benefit is that the crew now has a huge supply of food with them. Hope they like mint flavored.

Re:What about manned?

[Goaway]

I think you meant to say "Linux users" there. Nerdy Mac users tend to be nerds who have gotten tired of the posturing and social ineptness.

Re:What about manned?

[lju]

Wait, there are perks? I didn't get that memo...

Re:What about manned?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he had it right. Mac users are wannabes that aren't smart enough to realize that Steve Jobs is the new Steve Ballmer and Apple is the new Microsoft.

Re:What about manned?

[MrKaos]

Sounds like a cheap way to dispose of waste plutonium, lets build heaps of them bigger and faster.

Re:What about manned?

[Chris whatever]

the more i read comments the more i wonder if this is new news altogether

I actually read a sci-fi book from Dan Simmons who actually uses nuclear detonation to make the spaceship move. Either he was getting his info from someone or someone just said hey looks good in the book, let's apply it to real stuff.

Re:What about manned?

[Sethosayher]

I'm a Mac user who hasn't gotten laid in about 18 years. I'm pretty sure I qualify.

Re:What about manned?

[the real higgy]

There has always been a shortage of intelligent comment here....Very high asshole ratio

Re:What about manned?

[Napoleon The Pig]

That's one of the problems with controls theory. Three basic situations occur: Critically Damped, Over-Damped, and Under-Damped. None of which sound particularly good if you don't know what they mean. "Critically" is usually not a term used for anything benificial (eg Critical Condition), Over-Damped just sounds opressive, and Under-Damped sounds just as bad in the opposite direction. So basically, within controls theory, you're really damped if you do and damped if you don't.

Re:What about manned?

[Stefanwulf]

Not to rain on your parade of nationalist generalizations, but I don't believe the distinction between "damp" and "dampen" is really one that divides along U.S. and Commonwealth English. I've certainly run into both living here in the states, and many of the definitions cited just above come from dictionaries of U.S. English. As far as I can tell, engineering (in most English speaking nations including the UK) tends to use "damp" much more often -- which is why the hydraulic shock absorbers on cars in the UK are called "dampers" and not "dampeners", and the idiomatic "put a damper on things" is far more common here than "put a dampener", but in most other uses you can trade off freely and everyone's going to understand you.

Zippthorne was nitpicking and possibly being a bit curmudgeonly by demanding that people use the variant more common in technical circles, but as anyone who knows the world beyond their borders (or failing that, has read slashdot) can attest, that's hardly a trait unique to a single nationality.

Re:What about manned?

[rossifer]

That's NERVA, not Orion. I'm kinda partial to NERVA myself. You can get particle velocities (and therefore impulse) way up without all of the drama of bomb flinging.

And Orion isn't stupid, it's just impractical for peacetime deployment since it quickly becomes the only means of getting itself into orbit (at least until we begin taking apart asteroids and building things from in-space materials). The NIMBY freaks would be all up-in-arms about this taking off nearby. And for once, they may be right...

Regards,
Ross

Re:What about manned?

[modecx]

I'm not sure that I consider the negligence of personal hygiene and social life a "perk" of being a geek. I just thought it was a side affect... :(

Re:What about manned?

[djasbestos]

Hurray German cognates!

Re:What about manned?

[Jesus_666]

On Orion, yes, I knew that there would be shock absorbers, spreading the impulse out, but there will still be a huge difference in timing, magnitude, and direction between an infernal combustion engine and an Orion.

Yeah, but the Orion has much less wailing of tortured souls, which is a huge pro on long trips.

Re:What about manned?

[Duhavid]

"Yeah, but the Orion has much less wailing of tortured souls, which is a huge pro on long trips."

I don't know, reminds me of home it does, a bit of wailing.

Re:What about manned?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A major problem in a Mars mission is the huge weight of the rocket needed to get up from Mars to orbit"...

For answers, see "The Mars Underground" (2007)

Enjoy

Re:What about manned?

[SleptThroughClass]

That's why you put shear pins on the damper, so when it tries to yank on the main structure instead the damper falls away.

Re:What about manned?

[Goaway]

That would be the "posturing" I was speaking of.

Re:What about manned?

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, look at Apple users

Ah, yes. Nerds who get laid. ;)

Re:What about manned?

[Fox_1]

Two duds is not something which seems that unlikely to me.

Is the above a double negative? Are you really saying:Two duds is something which seems likely to me. ?

2 nuclear weapons in a row failing to explode? Has that ever happened that you know of? As far as I know every nuclear weapon that has been intended too blow up, well, has. There have been no dud Nukes - or if there have nobody is talking about it. I'm just messing with ya, but it's not like nuclear bombs is one of those technologies that works half the time, those suckers go BIG BADDA BOOM , not pfffft gasp wheeze.

Re:What about manned?

[celtic_hackr]

Let me get this straight. We go to the expense to build a nuclear bomb gun, let's face it that's what this is being described as on /., but read on, then we add dampers to absorb some of the energy released by the gun ... err ... engine, thus wasting a whole bunch of the energy we've just gone through the process of releasing. That's not a very good design for a space engine.

So what would be the efficiency of this monster? Thank goodness, that's not what the engine really is, but is just the confused ranting of the /. crowd. ;') ;') BTW I studied the original Orion in grade school, to figure out a way to make one. Yeah, I was really that geeky.

I RTFA and didn't see any reference to dampers, but the article also writer goofed. The engines should be sufficient to reach Mars in 60-90 days according to the specs, not 6 months. Six months for a round trip.

From what I could determine you wouldn't need dampers. The design of the engine appears to be sufficient to create a near continuous flow of plasma. It's not actually a "nuclear" explosion, but very close. Also, it's small enough that if you wanted/needed to you could stack multiple ones in an array, maybe one attached on a strut on each side of a flat saucer shaped disk, and then fire them rapidly in succession. Personally, I'd like to have four or five of these in a cluster. You know in case one or two engines were to fail. BTW, a 60-90 trip to Mars would be equivalent to the cross-Atlantic trips of our ancestors in ships like the Mayflower. So, it's feasible that some enterprising companies might build some ships and get some colonists to go to Mars. You also have to bear in mind that this could be a constant acceleration vehicle, and thus have a higher than the 10% speed of light velocity quoted. A constant acceleration vehicle would make interstellar travel very feasible, because you might take 3 months to reach .6c, and then another 3 months to decelerate. Giving travel to the nearest star in say 1-3 years, relative to the travelers. I'm too lazy to pull out the equation and do the calculation. I'll leave that to some other /.er. Although the matter-antimatter engine would probably be better.

Re:What about manned?

[WallaceAndGromit]

Any acoustician will tell you he is correct. I am an acoustician who specializes in structural acoustics, and completely agree with his comments.

If you want a reference go here...
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622899/description#description
and search for "damped vibration". You will see you obtained many references containing that phrase. Now search the same for "dampened vibration". You will find references, but none of them contain the word "dampened". Want more proof?

Re:What about manned?

[Anthony Stuckey]

There are a lot of these kinds of issues in laguage. damp/dampen is similar to use/utilize and affect/effect. People who utilize the word utilize when they could utilize the word use instead are promoting inefficiency in a transparently shallow attempt to appear intelligent. People who don't relize that affect and effect both have noun and verb meanings with different but related meanings are simply confused, as is likely with damp/dampen.

Re:What about manned?

[modecx]

You misunderstand the function of the flywheel. It's not to store energy that's going to the wheels, and the fact that torque going to the wheels often goes through the flywheel (or flexplate) is merely incidental, but it makes the best sense from a design aspect. It serves a dual purpose, as an interface to the clutch, but...

More importantly, the flywheel is there primarily to store enough energy to power the following compression strokes of the engine, and other design features are tangential to that function. This is why gasoline engines have wimpy little flywheels, and diesel engines of the same size have have honking heavy ones compared to the gasoline cousin. Higher compression==needs more power to do the job==needs a bigger flywheel. This is also why some early engines, (or indeed some large, modern, industrial diesel engines) have flywheels that are not in series with the rest of the power train.

The effect of the relatively tiny amount of energy stored in even a fairly massive flywheel, attached directly to an engine, is simply not enough to move a light car appreciably--unless, for instance you rev'd the engine up to redline, and somehow managed to disconnect the flywheel from the crankshaft, and then somehow managed to dump the clutch. You might be able to get the car to move a few feet on level surface by doing that, with a standard automotive flywheel--if that were even possible. This should demonstrate the idea that a flywheel doesn't quite do what you thinks it does.

Similarly, the flywheel doesn't smooth the power out that much. I build performance cars, and when I do so, I frequently reduce the mass of a flywheel, for one purpose: lower moment of inertia. This allows the engine to accelerate and deaccelerate more quickly, which is handy for performance driving, for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. The one side affect is that the car becomes a little easier to stall, which makes it a little less friendly to drive on the street, and can make it a lot less friendly to people who aren't used to said vehicles. To my ears and my pants, there has never been a discernible difference in the smoothness of either the engine or the smoothness of its power delivery when the flywheel is significantly lightened.

Re:What about manned?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Sigh... turn in your card. The correct answer is "Very well, thank you!"

Re:What about manned?

[Epsillon]

I said I was going away. I don't want to talk about it. Coat>card>reception>door>taxi :-)

Oh dear...

[Roger W Moore]

...I think someone forgot to tell the sun.

Re:Oh dear...

[MillionthMonkey]

But an international treaty means nothing to the son.

Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[patio11]

... this just means you get to nowhere faster.

(Sorry, reflexive poke at Wyoming. Wyoming has wonderful people, natural resources, and breathable atmosphere. Mars is 0 for 3. Jupiter doesn't even have a surface to land on, but now we can hurry up to get there and not land on it! Like the robot we're sending had some place it would rather be for the marginal time...)

Re:Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[thatskinnyguy]

Ummm Jupiter may have a surface to land on.

Re:Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, you know perfectly well that the moon of jupiter are the only reason we'd send people there at this point. And if you didn't know that you lose you geek card. Oh, and (gasp) they even have a surface to land on! As far as main propulsion goes, going from the earth to jupiter and going from the earth to jupiter's moons are exactly the same.

Re:Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[Khyber]

We would be crushed by Jupiter's gravity, or eaten by the acid-laden atmosphere. We're better off aiming for one of the moons, instead.

Re:Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[thatskinnyguy]

Still there may be a surface to land on... should we overcome the obstacles of getting there.

Re:Like stepping on the gas to get to Wyoming...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jupiter doesn't even have a surface to land on, but now we can hurry up to get there and not land on it! What the heck was all my training for, then?

Wham!

[CBob]

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

God was knocking & he wanted in bad.... (Footfall I think) .1c, not too bad, I'll take 4 of em.

Be about 70 years (if ever) before it gets off paper tho :-( NASA and innovate are 2 things that aren't going to happen anytime soon.

Re:Wham!

[camperdave]

Yes, it was Footfall. For those who missed it, Footfall is a Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle collaboration about an alien takeover of Earth, and our eventually overthrowing of them. Humans built an orion based ship to launch a number of weapon carriers at the Fithp ships.

Re:Wham!

[Anonymous Coward]

First thing I did in this thread was search for Niven.

Footfall was my first Niven book, and shortly thereafter I had read them all. And I went back to Footfall again.

Glad to see I'm not alone in this community.

Too bad Seattle had to go to her her into orbit.

Hey, my captcha was "environ", i.e. Orion ships might be unhealthy for the environ...ment...

Re:Wham!

[Chibi Merrow]

Man glad to know I'm not the only person who's read that book... And it was my first thought, too.

Looking at the proposed propulsion method (and how all the bad stuff is contained) makes me wonder how you'll use the explosions to power your gamma ray lasers, though...

Re:Wham!

[DarkSarin]

Yes, but if we can do that, then maybe we'll figure out how to jump up into the subspace bands that Weber keeps harping on about. Which honestly, if something like that existed, would be the best solution to our FTL problems with interstellar travel. Of course, Weber's only an astrophysicist, so who knows what we'll really find on our way to interstellar travel.

Pics

[StikyPad]

Here's a few pics of the Mini-Mag in action. Looks vaguely familiar... Interesting how the cargo capsule seems to release from one end and dock at the other. Very intriguing.

Re:Pics

[virgil_disgr4ce]

ROFL.

Wrong

[StefanJ]

Nuclear weapons, yes.

Power sources, no.

There are plenty of probes and spy satellites that are powered by plutonium-laden RTGs.

Re:Wrong

[Nyeerrmm]

Orion operates by exploding a weapon against a thrust plate, so it really qualifies as a weapon, which is at least one reason Orion was cancelled. I'm not sure how the treaty applies to space-based reactors, but theres definitely a large difference between an RTG and reactor as well.

Re:Wrong

[zippthorne]

Which is quite ironic, considering Orion was conceived as a way to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles...

Re:Wrong

[PitaBred]

The only thing that qualifies something as a weapon is how it's used. A hammer can be either a weapon or a tool. I think the same can be said of dynamite, and by extension, nuclear explosives.

Re:Wrong

[Nyeerrmm]

True, although I think the specific ban was on atmospheric (as opposed to underground) nuclear warhead tests that did in Orion. So even if not a weapon, still technically a warhead.

I think if we really wanted to do this now though, we could get the definitions changed, plus it looks like this isnt using a extra warheads we have lying around, but rather imploding chunks of fissible material using magnets, so it may not technically be a warhead anyway.

Re:Wrong

[TheRaven64]

A hammer can be either a weapon or a tool. And, while I'd object to a ban on hammers in general, I wouldn't object to a ban on people swinging hammers within a foot of my face. Scale this up by a few orders of magnitude, and you've got nuclear arms limitation treaties.

Re:Wrong

[tgd]

No it wasn't.

Not even close.

Go read some books about who was involved with the Orion designs, when those plans were put together and when the "reduce stockpiles" movement started -- you'll see how ridiculous a statement that is.

Re:Wrong

[Y-Crate]

The only thing that qualifies something as a weapon is how it's used. A hammer can be either a weapon or a tool. I think the same can be said of dynamite, and by extension, nuclear explosives. When you have a nuclear powered hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The 1950s and '60s proved that.

Hmm...

[wtfbbq]

Something about a nuclear powered space ship blowing up in the upper atmosphere on take-off/landing just doesn't seem appealing to me...wonder why?

Re:Hmm...

[tetrahedrassface]

Well if you aren't the type of person that doesn't like hair loss, nausea, leukemia, or spinal cancer then I guess you just .

WoW!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a MMO!

(sorry)

Bulk???

[Goonie]

If their gadget for doing the z-pinch thingy is anything like the Z machine at Sandia you won't be putting it on a spacecraft any time soon...

Re:Bulk???

[Magada]

The Z-machine is obsolete. There are easier ways to pump the required volts, one of which has recently been bought from the russkies.

Re:Bulk???

[Minwee]

That's an awfully big device just for playing Zork.

So let me get this straight...

[FSWKU]

It's an MMO, but how are they gonna deal with the latency between here and Mars? Better yet, what kind of hardware is the server running, and how much RAM will the client require? How do they plan to get past the annoyance of level-grinding?

The best part of the mini-mag design

[Anonymous Coward]

If you unscrew the cap in the stern of the spacecraft, you will find a spare nuclear reactor behind the battery terminal.

Reduces travel time how?

[Cousarr]

First off, I am not a rocket scientist, but I am studying for a BS in Aerospace Engineering.

How exactly is this supposed to reduce travel time? Current lengths of travel are not due to a lack of available thrust or due to amount of fuel available but rather the path taken to reach the destination. Currently in order to travel to say Mars Hohman transfers are often used. These paths and others like them take a certain amount of time to complete, and stronger engines or more available Delta-V allow only for more instantaneous entrances of the transfers or more allowed change in course once at the ship's destination.

In order to reduce time traveled a different orbital mechanic is needed. Even if a ship were to travel in a straight line toward a destination at a rapid enough speed that it would not have to meet up with it too much further along in its orbit it would have to be able to kill relative speed quickly enough to enter a capture orbit.

Anyone know what orbital transfer method they're saying that this engine makes possible?

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[ArcherB]

n order to reduce time traveled a different orbital mechanic is needed. Even if a ship were to travel in a straight line toward a destination at a rapid enough speed that it would not have to meet up with it too much further along in its orbit it would have to be able to kill relative speed quickly enough to enter a capture orbit.

My guess is that it turns around about half way during the trip to start slowing down.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[StefanJ]

As I recall, Hohman orbits are nice ellipses with body A at perisol and body B and aposol. You make a burn to get into it and out of it; the delta-v required is the difference in velocity between a body in a "circular" orbit at that radius and the velocity of a body in the elliptical orbit. If the planet happens to be at that point, you then just need to make another burn to get into orbit. Timing is important.

Even Hohman orbits are too "spendy" for chemically fueled rockets. Thus the complex back-and-forth gravity-assist paths that NASA probes take on the way to the outer planets, and the use of aerobreaking by Mars probes.

Other, faster transfers are possible. You just enter another sort of elliptical orbit whose path intersects earth's orbit when you leave it, and the destination planet's orbit at a time when the planet will be there. Of course, you have to have a spaceship capable of the much greater change in velocity to enter these orbits.

The linked-too documents suggest that the "mini mag" is not only fuel efficient (read: high Isp), but has a decent amount of thrust. This means it CAN make the drastic changes in velocity necessary.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[pintpusher]

BS in Aerospace Engineering. ya know, it seems like a lot of these space articles are pretty much just that: BS in Aerospace Engineering.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wikipedia:

"So journeys to the nearest planets, Mars and Venus, use a Hohmann transfer orbit, an elliptical path which starts as a tangent to one planet's orbit round the sun and finishes as a tangent to the other's. This method uses very nearly the smallest possible amount of fuel, but is very slow - it can take over a year to travel from Earth to Mars (fuzzy orbits use even less fuel, but are even slower)."

What they are saying is this engine is so much more efficient, fuel is not an issue that it is for current rockets, therefore it can boost long enough to reach much higher speeds: From the article:

"The spacecraft itself will only have to carry a relatively small amount of fissionable material as fuel and will be able to reach speeds of approximately 10% of the speed of light,". Current technology can't carry enough fuel to come anywhere NEAR that speed. That type of speed/efficiencies which allows a more like a brute force direct path. Read more of the links on Wikipedia, they talk about it further. Interesting stuff.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Hohman transfers are slow and cheap; that's why we use them. If you have a much more energy-dense fuel supply (plutonium certainly fills the bill) there are much faster routes available.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Nefarious Wheel]

My guess is that it turns around about half way during the trip to start slowing down.

Wouldn't necessarily be half way, we're not talking linear vectors are we? If we're playing catch-up with a planetary target the crossover point might be a bit later than km/2. It's more expensive to escape the closer you are to the sun's gravity well, but I'd think a lot of the energy would be soaked relative to the velocity of the target, i.e. there may not be as much energy to dump near the target. Space ain't flat, found that out from my office mate who was doing the orbital geometry for Pioneer Venus 12/13 some years back (which had the inverse effect, being inward from EO).

I don't know why he kept a separate set of comps in furlongs per fortnight, but us programmerz was wierd back then.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[king-manic]

Hohman transfers are slow and cheap; that's why we use them. If you have a much more energy-dense fuel supply (plutonium certainly fills the bill) there are much faster routes available.

I prefer a holtzman Transfer. Get there in 0.01s. Only bad thing is no one knows how it works except god and Holtzmans wife. And God help you if you bring a laser pointer.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[camperdave]

Current lengths of travel are not due to a lack of available thrust or due to amount of fuel available but rather the path taken to reach the destination.

Of course they are. The available thrust determines the path taken. Basically, the transfer orbit is an elliptical orbit that touches both the inner (in this case Earth's) orbit, and the outer (Mars') orbit. There is a burn at the start, to kick the craft into the transfer orbit, and a burn at the end, to knock the craft out of the transfer orbit. If you change the thrust, you change the minor axis of the ellipse, which affects transit time.

Note though, that the craft is unpowered during the majority of it's flight. In other words, it has a ballistic trajectory. If the craft is powered, it can take a more direct path. Think of it this way, I could lob a rock at a target with a catapult, and the rock would follow a ballistic path to the target. It would take a certain amount of time to get there. Alternatively, I could fire a missile at the target. Because the the missile is under power, it would take a different path than the rock, and would arrive at the target much faster. Similarly, an continually powered rocket can take a much different path than a Homann transfer. Perhaps the path is a cardioid or some type of spiral.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[zippthorne]

Ask your professor about a "chase maneuver." that should get you on the right track.

Hohman Transfers are nice because they are minimum energy transfers (and not necessarily that if you've got more than two bodies and a lot of patience) if you've got a high-thrust impulse engine. (as in, it's only capable of short bursts of high thrusts. compare to continuous thrust options as seen in Deep Space 1.)

They are by no means the minimum time transfer if you've got Delta-V to spare.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[iluvcapra]

I prefer a holtzman Transfer. Get there in 0.01s. Only bad thing is no one knows how it works except god and Holtzmans wife. And God help you if you bring a laser pointer.

That and the Spice turns you into a fish-person. Which would be fine, except that David Lynch takes one look at you and tries to make you into some kind of political point ;)

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[DerekLyons]

First off, I am not a rocket scientist, but I am studying for a BS in Aerospace Engineering.

At what level? A sophmore in high school? (Translated: I love how people wave about unrelated credentials as if it gives weight to what they are talking about.)
 
 

How exactly is this supposed to reduce travel time? Current lengths of travel are not due to a lack of available thrust or due to amount of fuel available but rather the path taken to reach the destination.

Half true at best - because the current travel lengths are a product of the low amounts of Delta-V available. (And acceleration is itself a product of fuel and thrust.)
 
 

Currently in order to travel to say Mars Hohman transfers are often used.

Duh! Because they are low energy orbits.
 
 

These paths and others like them take a certain amount of time to complete, and stronger engines or more available Delta-V allow only for more instantaneous entrances of the transfers or more allowed change in course once at the ship's destination.

Another half truth - what you say is only true below a certain level of Delta-V. Once you get above that level, you simply proceed to your destination by a more direct path.
 
 

In order to reduce time traveled a different orbital mechanic is needed. Even if a ship were to travel in a straight line toward a destination at a rapid enough speed that it would not have to meet up with it too much further along in its orbit it would have to be able to kill relative speed quickly enough to enter a capture orbit.

Duh. Anyone who read Heinlein as a ten year old knows this.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[DerekLyons]

Even Hohman orbits are too "spendy" for chemically fueled rockets. Thus the complex back-and-forth gravity-assist paths that NASA probes take on the way to the outer planets,

Wrong.
 
Gravity assist is used because Hohman orbits would take decades to reach the outer planets.
 
 

and the use of aerobreaking by Mars probes.

Wrong.
 
Aerobraking is used as an alternative to retro braking - because it allows finer control of the final orbit with less fuel and somewhat less weight.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[icebrain]

You guys are both right. Using a gravity assist reduces the delta-V needs of your spacecraft, allowing either a bigger payload for a given rocket, or a smaller rocket (read: less $) for a given payload. It can also cut down on travel time if used correctly.

However, I do find it hard to believe that aerobraking allows finer orbit control than a propulsive burn, especially around Mars. That atmosphere changes a lot relative to earth's, and introduces a lot of uncertainty on some missions. And even if we're talking aerocapture, it's still a little uncertain. The primary reason for both is fuel savings.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Nyrath the nearly wi]

Hohmann transfers are used because feeble chemical propulsion cannot produce the delta V required for a quicker transfer orbit.

Atomic Rockets

At the other end of the spectrum of transfer orbits are Brachistochrone trajectories. When the propulsion system becomes powerful enough to produce delta Vs higher than about 10 km/sec, you can treat the planets as being essentially stationary, that is, they will not move appreciably in the short time required for transit.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[ArcherB]

My guess is that it turns around about half way during the trip to start slowing down. Wouldn't necessarily be half way, we're not talking linear vectors are we? If we're playing catch-up with a planetary target the crossover point might be a bit later than km/2. It's more expensive to escape the closer you are to the sun's gravity well, but I'd think a lot of the energy would be soaked relative to the velocity of the target, i.e. there may not be as much energy to dump near the target. Space ain't flat, found that out from my office mate who was doing the orbital geometry for Pioneer Venus 12/13 some years back (which had the inverse effect, being inward from EO).

I don't know why he kept a separate set of comps in furlongs per fortnight, but us programmerz was wierd back then. Right, that's why I threw the "about" in there. I have no idea as to the escape velocity of Earth and what the velocity needs to be in order to be captured by a planet's gravity to enter orbit. When Picard says, "Standard orbit, Mr. Crusher!" I'm like Picard and let the boy genius figure out how to enter orbit.

Sure, I could look up the velocity needed to escape Earth's gravity and then look up the velocity needed to enter orbit at a particular angle of approach and then find the point needed to fire breaking thrusters minus the amount of time it takes to turn around (assuming that the "braking thrusters" are the same engine(s) as the pusher engine(s)) multiplied by the current (maximum) velocity and figure in gravitational forces and....and.... and.... but I am way too lazy and probably not be that smart anyway. That's why I'm glad we have people like you that take the time in school and work to figure these things out so us "not-so-bright/motivated" people can go about our lives and watch all the cool stuff guys like you do on TV or slashdot. On occasion we'll throw out a quip like I did to make ourselves look smart, but some of us know where the real talent lies and we watch in awe at the amazing stuff you guys do!

After reading this again, I realize that it may look sarcastic. Trust me, it's not.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a complete asshole.

You'll fit right in here!

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[cool_arrow]

Translates to: "look at me, I'm smart too".

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[cool_arrow]

My response to you is: Duh! You should mod it insightful.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[sjames]

The Hohman transfer is NOT the fastest path between two orbiting bodies, it is the path with the minimum required delta-v (the actual difference between origin and destination planets). More complex paths don't reduce the delta-v further, they just exploit gravitational effects to get part of that delta-v "for free".

If more delta-v is available (due to an abundance of fuel), there are faster paths where you apply "more than enough" at the start and then cancel part of it with braking thrust at the destination.

As for the appearance, the Hohman looks like a segment of an elliptical orbit whose perhelion intersects the orbit of Earth and the aphelion intersects the orbit of Mars (in this case). A faster path is a segment of an ellipse where the perhelion intersects the Earth's orbit and the (never reached) aphelion is way out beyond the orbit of mars. The braking delta-v is applied near the point where it intersects the orbit of Mars. The more delta-v you have vs. the Hohman transfer, the closer you path approaches (but never reaches) a straight line.

All of the above is simplified. In practice, the delta-v would be continuous throughout the flight with a nuclear engine.

Re:Reduces travel time how?

[Deliveranc3]

Sorry how is being able to slow enough to enter the proper orbit not a problem of having enough thrust?

It seems like this would actually solve the problem you says it doesn't solve?

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[Arabani]

The original studies performed extensive studies on this problem. They solved it with a double shock absorber system; by tuning the absorbers and the frequency at which bombs were ejected, they could achieve a constant acceleration of 1-2 g.

fissionable material?

[stox]

All sorts of nasty crap will be blowing out the tail end of this puppy. Wasn't this predicted in Space 1999 with the Queller Drive?

Not like old Orion

[StefanJ]

This one is going to be built in orbit. It will never take off or land.

OTOH, the "fuel" pellets are going to be made of fissionable materials. I hope they point the nozzle in a direction that doesn't result in un-detonated bomblets burning up in the atmosphere.

Re:Not like old Orion

[Gothmolly]

You do realize that burning coal has put more Uranium into the air than all the atomic explosions combined right?

Re:Not like old Orion

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You do realize that burning coal has put more Uranium into the air than all the atomic explosions combined right?

I'm more worried about Strontium 90 and radioactive iodine.

Given that Hanford deliberately released a BUNCH of radioactive iodine upwind of an indian reservation at least partly to see what its effects would be on the "marginal population" of indians and rednecks downwind (leading to a considerable increase in birth defect constelations and graves' disease), I suspect others are with me on that.

Also Homer Simpson is the Safety Inspector for the

[Joe The Dragon]

Also Homer Simpson is the Safety Inspector for the nuclear parts of the project. He was picked for his Astronaut for NASA and nuclear technician / nuclear Safety job experience.

Footfall

[Anonymous Coward]

Niven and Pournelle.

Slashdotted?

[barakn]

These people are visionaries, except when it comes to anticipating large server loads.

Re:Slashdotted?

[Tablizer]

These people are visionaries, except when it comes to anticipating large server loads.

Indeed. The ship will reach Jupiter before the damned bytes get to me from their server. Discrimination! Guess I'll go off my diet to compete with Jupiter.

Jup in a Year

[Tablizer]

and enable future spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of space traveling.

The New Horizons probe, heading to Pluto, took slightly more than a year to reach Jupiter. However, there was no need to stop (park in orbit) and it didn't need to carry bulky life-support stuff. Thus, it could take the fast train.

Cassini

[mark0]

You mean like a plutonium powered vehicle?

Re:Cassini

[MillionthMonkey]

An RTG doesn't count. If they use plutonium, it's Pu-238 (alpha emitter) with a half life of less than 90 years, not Pu-239 which has a 90,000 year half life (fewer watts per gram) and can support a chain reaction (so it's needed for other things). There are lots of them scattered about the former Soviet Union so if you're doing any hiking there, avoid heat-emanating ceramic objects.

When not using solar panels (conspicuous and vulnerable) Americans like to power their satellites with RTGs. The Soviets put 35 reactor-powered satellites in orbit and only a few RTG-powered satellites. What was forbidden by the treaty was nuclear weapons, specifically including tests. An interstellar spacecraft powered by nuclear explosions would be a great way to sneakily test your weapons in full view of everyone.

Re:Cassini

[Criton]

Again no since this is a miniature z machine it would offer less to nuclear weapons testing research then existing ground z machines and inertial laser confinement fusion devices already do.

Transfer orbit

[Kadin2048]

I believe they are using the "Journalist Transfer Orbit." This is a highly specialized piece of orbital mechanics: basically, you take the average distance to the destination as given by Wikipedia and divide by the spacecraft's top speed.

Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[Animats]

First, this is a blog troll, to drive traffic to some ".info" site. The actual paper, "Proposed Follow-on Mini-Mag Orion Pulsed Propulsion Concept" presented at an AIAA conference last year, is more useful.

The basic idea is to create a small fission (not fusion) explosion using magnetic compression. Nuclear weapons use chemical explosives to create an implosion, and during the implosion the fissionable material is compressed hard enough to get a 1.5x to (maybe) 2x density increase. With magnetic compression, a small pellet can be compressed hard enough to get a 10x density increase. This allows smaller explosions, around 50 gigajoules instead of the 20 terajoules of a fission bomb. They want to use curium or californium as the fuel, rather than plutonium.

They also want to use magnetic containment, rather than an Orion-style "pusher plate" sprayed with oil. Unclear if that can be made to work.

The experimental work (they compressed an aluminum cylinder with a big magnet at Sandia) was done back in 2002. This isn't really under active development.

It's not a totally unreasonable idea, but it would be a huge job to make it work. For one thing, the plan is to assemble a large spacecraft in orbit, not to take off from Earth. It doesn't help with the problem of putting mass in orbit.

Re:Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

They also want to use magnetic containment, rather than an Orion-style "pusher plate" sprayed with oil. Unclear if that can be made to work.

Ought to be a cake-walk once they've got the field in place to make it go "bang".

The pellet is ALREADY confined in a mag field. The re-expanding plasma from the explosion dumps much of its energy into compressing the field between the plasma and the conductor that created it, making the field stronger (and dumping a bunch of the energy back into the conductor as electricity for potential reuse or consumption).

Should be easy to create a selective leak in the desired direction and more fields to guide the plasma as it makes its getaway. (In fact the compressed field toward the vehicle can be used as a spring to return some of that collected energy to the plasma, further increasing the exhaust velocity. And/or the energy from the compressed field could be used to create or strengthen the "nozzle" guiding fields, just-in-time to guide the burst of plasma.)

Lots of opportunity for cute electric/magnetic/plasma engineering tricks here.

And unlike fusion the time scale, from ignition to completion of the exhaust cycle, is short, so plasma instabilities aren't an issue.

Re:Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[Nefarious Wheel]

Should be easy to create a selective leak in the desired direction and more fields to guide the plasma as it makes its getaway.

Hey, vectored thrust via springy, leaky magnetic fields -- this puppy can be dirigible. +Insightful, Ungrounded_Lightning, nice idea.

Re:Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[DerekLyons]

It's not a totally unreasonable idea

So long as you don't look too hard at the specs on the unobtanium reactors used to power the whole thing.

Re:Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[Cerebus]

My understanding is that one of the killers (no pun intended) of the Orion concept was that radioactive ejecta from the drive would inevitably find its way to ground-level, even if it was operating in Lunar orbit. It was mentioned in Dyson's book _Project Orion_ that they had estimated the number of annual excess deaths from cancer caused by launching a single Orion from ground as well as from various orbits.

Since this concept will still eject various nasty radioisotopes as well, I wonder if they've done the same analysis.

Re:Blog troll. Link to real info here.

[careysub]

The basic idea is to create a small fission (not fusion) explosion using magnetic compression. Nuclear weapons use chemical explosives to create an implosion, and during the implosion the fissionable material is compressed hard enough to get a 1.5x to (maybe) 2x density increase. With magnetic compression, a small pellet can be compressed hard enough to get a 10x density increase. This allows smaller explosions, around 50 gigajoules instead of the 20 terajoules of a fission bomb. They want to use curium or californium as the fuel, rather than plutonium.

The experimental work (they compressed an aluminum cylinder with a big magnet at Sandia) was done back in 2002. This isn't really under active development... It's not a totally unreasonable idea, but it would be a huge job to make it work.

Good post.

To expand upon it a bit, I will observe that actual pressures and compressions demonstrated so far are maybe a couple of orders of magnitude below what is needed to achieve 10-fold compression of fissile material. They demonstrated pressures of 2.4 megabars (atmospheres) and roughly two-fold compression in aluminum, performance generally similar to what high explosive implosion systems have produced for over 50 years. Despite decades of work, HE implosion has never been scaled to the pressures or compressions postulated for this. See: APS and AIP pages on this.

Now, their ace-on-the-hole is that they can achieve isentropic compression (i.e. optimal compression, without heating) explosive systems cannot, but even so they aren't in the ball-park with this, only looking at it with binoculars. And the Z-machine is a huge immobile installation. How to convert a grossly souped up version of it to practical flight-ready hardware would be a staggering task.

So this is in the same league as commercial fusion power. A concept that has some grounding in reality, but possibly one forever beyond practicality, and certainly beyond the working career of any living engineer.

Re:Also Homer Simpson is the Safety Inspector for

[darkonc]

Perhaps we can re-activate George Bush's commission and make him a test pilot?

Magnetic Onion?

[Chrondeath]

Anyone else read that as "Miniature Magnetic Onion"?

Oh, and I forgot to say this

[Khyber]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jupiter_interior.png

METAL HYDROGEN. If the pressure didn't kill you, the temperatures would vaporize you.

Re:Oh, and I forgot to say this

[Nefarious Wheel]

METAL HYDROGEN. If the pressure didn't kill you, the temperatures would vaporize you

If hydrogen was solid, you wouldn't be vapour, matey. You'd be a very thin layer of graphite.

Re:Oh, and I forgot to say this

[Khyber]

That may be true, now that I read more about metal hydrogen only needing to be at 80 or so degrees farenheit under a fair amount of pressure. We could have balmy weather and just be compressed, then, eh?

This isn't fit for the Federation

[Anonymous Coward]

I was really excited about this until I clicked on the article and found out it only goes .1 warp speed. That's not even half impulse.

Maybe next time.

Andrews Space

[sabre86]

The company behind the technology is Andrews Space at this site.

From my (admitted limited) viewpoint as an (inexperienced) aerospace engineer, they look like the real thing.

The system is actually described in a 2003 AIAA conference paper linked on this page. The paper is titled "Mini-MagOrion: A Pulsed Nuclear Rocket for Crewed Solar System Exploration."

I've only glanced over the article so far, but it suggests specific impulses in the 10,000 seconds plus range. That's a critical measure of efficiency in a rocket that dictates the velocity it can obtain. The shuttle's SSMEs get about 455 seconds of specific impulse at a high thrust (millions of Newtons) and ion drives, like the one on the DS1 probe, and the like get specific impulses (Isp) of about 3000 seconds at low thrust. (millinewtons). Apparently the Mini-Mag Orion can produce thrust on par with the SSME. Yikes.

--sabre86

Re:Andrews Space

[guardian-ct]

In other words, the MMORPG (Mini-Mag Orion Rocket Propulsion Generator) was released today. Wow!

Reminds me of...

[madbawa]

...Calculus!! I think it was Destination Moon or Explorers on the Moon (Adventures of Tintin). He had a nuclear powered rocket then. Bah!

Re:Reminds me of...

[freedom_india]

Dude! Give some respect.
It was Professor Calculus. Not just plain Calculus.
Anyway that was the best tintin i had read (After Tibet).

Re:Reminds me of...

[justme8800]

Oh, come off it, he was referred to as just plain "Calculus" plenty of times in the books. Anyways, yeah, that was one of the better books for sure.

Acting the goat... I don't know that I'd willingly get on a machine built by that character in a hurry! Fun stuff.

Have you ever driven with someone learning clutch?

[SuperKendall]

It's like that, just for a few million miles.

Bring some asprin.

What's the point?

[Jartan]

We keep hearing about all these great technologies that will whiz us around the solar system but none of them are going to be of much use. Anything remotely nuclear is probably not going to be allowed to opperate in atmosphere. The military might be allowed to make and man such vehicles but I doubt I'll be booking a trip to the moon on such a thing.

So as usual until we get some serious work put into cheap methods to get out of the gravity well nobody is going to have any real dreams fulfilled. Maybe some people think it's enough for scientists to get info out of it but even for someone very pro science like me that doesn't cut it at all. Not even close.

Scam Alert!!!

[YetAnotherBob]

from the Article, It's non-nuclear, uses explosives, magnetic field nozzle. Claims 50% more efficient than Space Shuttle engines. Starship drive. Think about that for a moment. They are claiming better Isp than a hydrogen/oxygen engine using solid explosives, and proposing a chemically powered starship. They don't have a working model, or even a real process yet. Using explosives will result in relatively massive exhaust particles, meaning low Isp. I'd like to see how their physics works out. Seems like a rocket version of perpetual motion to me. Apparently they got a little NASA money, so they must know a congressman. But, I can see no way they can deliver on these promises.

The pic in TFA looks like

[Anonymous Coward]

a bundle of smokes and an interesting tip to allow you to smoke em all at once...

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh you're no fun.
WHUMP ! WHUMP ! Giggle!

Wanted : Space Based Uranium Source

[tjstork]

The common thread that we keep coming back to is that to really do spaceflight, you must have some form of nuclear power. The laws of physics are profoundly strong on this point. Space is too far and gravity is too strong for chemical rockets to really be successful.

The ideal solution is to find a source of uranium in space, beyond Earth's gravity well, such that, we can mine the uranium in space, and fuel nuclear powered spacecraft from perhaps the moon. I don't see that happening any time soon, as, it is my understanding that its is practically a fluke that a relatively small body like Earth should wind up with such a heavy ore at all. The gods were kind to us during our solar system formation, and it feels unlikely that any asteroid should have a significant uranium deposit.

That leaves us to launching live reactors into space from Earth. Unfortunately, despite safety precautions, the environmental movement makes the development of nuclear powered spacecraft a political impossibility. We can't even build a reactor on land without a mountain of red tape and lawsuits from the greens, even when we know that building such reactors are necessary to combat global warming. Putting a nuclear reactor into something that flies is unthinkable to them, and they would surely think that putting a nuclear reactor into a rocket is downright crazy. Even RTGs, relatively benign, are met with protest. Were it up them, there would be no pictures of Saturn at all from Cassini.

In this one area, the left wing claim to scientific curiosity falls flat on its face. The science is not worth the risk. I think the key to be able to do this, really, is going to be to engage the right wing instead and paint such research as a matter of national security. The right wing, despite its proclaimed conservatism, has a penchant for throwing caution into the wind when it suits it. Heck, they'd blow off global warming just to be able to keep driving trucks. Put a nuclear reactor on a spacecraft to get to Mars in a few weeks, sure, why not? For them, though, the issue is going to be why. Doing it just for the science isn't going to cut it. However, the right does have a penchant for engaging in enormous projects for ideological goals - witness the cold war with Russia, the current war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. None of THOSE projects were cheap or short term, and honestly, only the right wing has the zeal needed to overcome failure after failure as would occur in a really long term space colonization project. Even if you disagree with it, religion is an enormously powerful motivator.

Thus, you'll never get many righties to buy into space for the science, or the future profits, because both don't really do much. But if you could sell them space as a religious duty, then by God, they will say screw the left, throw a hundred billion dollars a year into building nuclear rockets that this country needs, all to create christian colonies on planets and take resources from asteroids. If anything, one could always further argue that with the Russians claiming the North Pole, then, the USA has to claim (something), and it may as well be Mars and the asteroid belt. Asking them to void the UN Treaty on claiming stuff on space would elicit an automatic yes - as the right is already predisposed against the UN.

Surely such a project would be better for the world than the war on terror.

The point is this, and this goes for both left and right. We are entering a time of great consequence for the United States, if not the world, and, it is time for us to stop seeing each other as enemies simply because we have different ideologies. We can make our differences work for us, so long as we express what we want for ourselves as individuals, not as collective party members, and from there identify those strengths we have in each other.

In my case, I selfishly want to see the USA building a fleet of nuclear, manned, rockets, mining asteroids, and colonizing other planets. And, if I have to read the

Re:Wanted : Space Based Uranium Source

[Nefarious Wheel]

There's a whole planet spread out in pieces between Mars and Jupiter. Should be a few lumps of sub-critical mass in there you can mine.

I kind of agree, kind of disagree with your assertion about the reasons why people would go into space. Right-wing? I don't think so, necessarily -- unless your definition of right wing means people who are most easily influenced. Your equation is cogent but your coefficients are wrong, I think.

It isn't right-wing so much, I'd say rather that it's the category of people who are capable of being inspired by an inspirational leader. Kennedy wasn't right-wing, but he effected the space program as a reaction to the Soviet space successes (ok, the Soviet Union was slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun, despite their bolshie-leftie origins. You score a point on that one).

The point is you need a critical mass who sense a need, and an inspirational and visionary leader as an ignition source in an environment of social awareness heightened enough to form a response. I'd put my money behind the one with the best rhetoric.

Or how about this? Find a way to determine that the stone in the centre of Mecca is chemically identical to a rock in the Asteroid Belt, and you'll have millions of people with a new interest in recapturing the scientific advantage they had a few hundred years ago.

Ok, I think I need to go home now and pop a couple of tinnies before my metaphors get any more mixed...

Re:Wanted : Space Based Uranium Source

[NeMon'ess]

If wikipedia is correct "The total mass of the Asteroid belt is estimated to be 3.0-3.6×1021 kilograms,[2][3] which is 4% of the Earth's Moon. Of that total mass, one-third is accounted for by Ceres alone. The four largest asteroids (if Ceres is included) contain almost half the total mass within the main belt.[4][5]"

Re:Wanted : Space Based Uranium Source

[plsuh]

Kennedy wasn't right-wing, but he effected the space program as a reaction to the Soviet space successes

Glory Hallelujah! Someone actually knows how to use the word "effected" in a grammatically correct fashion on Slashdot! Congratulations! You, sir or madam, are far too good for this site! :-D

--Paul

Re:Wanted : Space Based Uranium Source

[Nefarious Wheel]

Thank you! Grammar seldom receives the credit deserved (and if she were alive today I'd tell her that again).

What's the upgrade path from Slashdot?

not cost effective and premature

[m2943]

The best way right now to travel around the solar system is on the interplanetary transport network: slow but low cost transports that are great for moving robotic probes efficiently around the solar system.

I think it's premature to worry about building nuclear powered rockets like that; by the time we will actually be ready to send a human to another planet, we'll have completely different technology. Or, perhaps, we can use suspended animation and use the ITN even for human cargo.

Jupiter

[1u3hr]

If we weren't killed by the radiation* first. The gravity is only 2.2 g; not comfortable, but you could get around; very slowly.

* Jupiter actually gives off more heat than it gets from the Sun. This heat comes from two sources - the slow collapse of the solid core, and the heat of decay from various radioactive trace elements. This energy appears as radiation, and as various radio signals. The radiation from Jupiter at close range is enough to kill an unprotected human within minutes.

"who cares if we nuke a spot of Martian desert"

[mbessey]

"who cares if we nuke a spot of Martian desert after we've analysed it already..."

I imagine that the Martian lifeforms we're going there to look for might care.

Re:"who cares if we nuke a spot of Martian desert"

[Peeteriz]

As I said, 'after we explore them'. We'll take anything that looks interesting with us before the launch, and since the next landing most probably will be elsewhere (just to ensure diversity, i.e. checking different places), then we won't be returning to that spot in any case.

Re:"who cares if we nuke a spot of Martian desert"

[Anonymous Coward]

As I said, 'after we explore them'. We'll take anything that looks interesting with us before the launch

Interplanetary news: Earthlings abduct Martians! News at 11!

since the next landing most probably will be elsewhere (just to ensure Mars is thoroughly nuked, i.e. checking different places)

Fixed.

then we won't be returning to that spot

I'd imagine. Nuclear wastelands aren't exactly the tourist attractions one might think...

Interesting company. Looking for investors?

[Futurepower(R)]

Looks like an interesting company. The CEO and President are married.

However, there have been numerous Slashdot stories that have been about companies looking for investors. It would be more comfortable if such stories would have a statement that no one at Slashdot or Slashdot's parent company took money to run the story.

Miniature Magnetic Orion ? Who doesn't like MMO ?

[Atreide]

All nerds will like MMO, even those who do not play.

Sounds a bit like..

[hcdejong]

James Follett's novel 'Torus', in which the Soviets build a weapon that works on the same principle: detonate a nuke and use a magnetic field to contain and direct the particles into a beam.

Car Engine

[tixie]

Aren't we trying to eliminate the gas engine with more efficient engines? Now we are building a way larger one? Go, detroit!!!!

Technical Writing 101

[E 99]

From the article:
"Due to the magnetic compression thrust technology, spacecrafts could be smaller and less heavy."

Now can anyone tell me the technical term for that? Anyone? Yes, Johnny, the term is "lighter."

And the plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft."

The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Ihlosi]

Even if this craft can reach speeds of 10% the speed of light we would still be limited to interplanetary exploration and exploitation (human nature dictates this).

The solar system is a big enough place for exploitation, and when we're done with the planets and their moons we can look at the Kuiper belt. That should keep us busy for the next couple of centuries, at least, and also allow us to use technologies to actually analyze nearby star systems without having to send probes there just yet.

And once the solar system gets too small for use, we probably have the necessary technologies, experience and infrastructure to send something on an interstellar voyage (probably a generation ship or even a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems).

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

"a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems"

Am I the only one who thinks we should paint this thing with flowers and peace symbols like a 1960's volkswagen camper van?

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[shinma]

a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems We could call it Warworld.

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[JWW]

"a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems"

Am I the only one who thinks we should paint this thing with flowers and peace symbols like a 1960's volkswagen camper van?

Yeah, because the first thing that popped into my mind was a moon looking thing with a planet destroying laser ;-)

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Guysmiley777]

And what ever you do, DON'T pick Mimas as the planetiod... That's no moon!

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Opie812]

...a small planetoid outfitted with propulsion systems

...that's no moon...

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Gilmoure]

Man, I wish I could draw. I can see it now; a web comic about a bunch of space hippies running around the galaxy in VW Planetoid.

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shades of the movie "Heavy Metal"

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[jank1887]

THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

ack... have to fight the lameness filter. that was yelling, apparently.

Re:The solar system is big enough for the moment.

[Criton]

yah this solar system has over 100 planets and moons and countless asteroids and TNOs. Also on interstellar travel two other possibilities one if you can reach 90% lightspeed time slows down option two it seems a warp drive could be possible see the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive.

Miniature Magnetic Orion ?

[Yvanhoe]

Man, I long for the days when men were men, women were women, and any serious space exploration project had his own 8,000,000 tons spaceship powered by 1000 bombs of 3 tons !

Go for the Super Orion !

Innovative Optimization

[splutty]

Uhm... Yeah... Right... Innovative indeed...

I have an innovative optimization for the slow running windows system. It's a random mixture of the letters cmfroat.
I also have a very innovative bit of beach in northern texas.
And of course my innovative system of election by sniper rifle is always a good one!

Nuclear rocketry can be safe even from the ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Do some reading in the following site. Being a nerd meens dropping preconceptions.

http://www.nuclearspace.com/

or

http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship.htm

It has been thought out.
If a accident in a flight pumps out in a worse case scenario a small nuke test would you be willing to fly in space the mass of 100 or a thousand conventional flights ? I can tell you burning coal pumps the highest level of radioactivity to our atmosphere. There was a time when we were setting off hundreds of times this in our atmosphere.

If after 1000 successful flights with no accident, you can then load them with thousands of tonnes of nuclear polution and actualy chuck it in the sun.

In the end we become pollution negative !!!

Don't worry, given time and a few generations this will become fact.

Giorgis

relativity...

[mathfeel]

10% the speed of light, huh? Time dilation effect would be quite visible then...Now THAT is a spaceship!!

No more thought experiments. Rejoice physics students everywhere.

(Manned versus robotic) space exploration?

[N3wsByt3]

A frequently occurring debate on /. is with the question whether or not we should have space-exploration (and as a subset: human vs. robotic space exploration). This involves the "we should spend the money on other things, like combating worldhunger"-arguments, as the more subtile arguments which is better: human or robotic exploration.

I have pondered a long time about this, and this is my conclusion:

We all heard the reasoning for abolishing space-exploration (particular human-based) before, and I think the major flaw in all these 'arguments' why we shouldn't go into space is that they always set economic factors as a premise.

But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrow-minded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases, or for diseases that are prevalent in continents that are poor, so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.

If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner ;-)

Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognize other incentives apart from economical ones.

And the reason why we shouldn't (only) rely on robots? You can explore, but you can not colonize with robots. The will to explore is deeply entrenched in the human race, but with a reason: it has survival advantages.

A species that doesn't colonize new territory and adapt, will perish. I think it's paramount that humans always keep their spirit of adventure and keep exploring and expanding, because the moment we will go "ah, let's sit back in our sofa's and let our robots/droids do it", we're basically finished, even when not being aware of it at that moment.

So, to to all the people saying we don't *need* space-exploration (human or otherwise); we don't *need* the pyramids neither, nor all those great buildings and artworks, nor any luxury, etc. The only thing we 'need' is food and shelter. Based on what we truly 'need' thus, we should go back living like cavemen. But of course, we don't, and the reason is that we, as humans, look beyond our immediate needs and have (and should have) grander visions.

So, economics (and also the ratio of costs/science output) is often less good with human space-travel then robotic ones. Contrary to some zealots, I do not dispute that. But, as I have indicated, I do not think one should measure everything in terms of economic benefits. Even if you could send a hundred, or a thousand robots for the price of one human mission, it still would not change the fact that robots can't colonize planets, and augment the survival chances of the human race (and earths' ecology) through interplanetary spreading.

Why 2 years?

[denzacar]

Didn't Dr. Robert Zubrin cut it down to 6 months in one direction already? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0437325/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin
Using like... 19th century technology and not... you know... like... those banned nuclear thingies?

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[Warbothong]

Any study on the effects on the rest of the plane-WHUMP AAAAA!! MY FACE IS MELTING!!!

Pseudo-Gravity?

[American Scum]

So if the occupants were to live, and stand, on the base of their living quarters - the base being the 'lower' part of the module that connected to the top of the shock-absorber part, perhaps the 1-G force would be like gravity here on earth? The surging, if standing on it, seems like it would be the rhythmic up and down of the deck of a boat whilst on the ocean. Heck, if that's the way it is, Shiver me timbers! - it'll be their sea-legs, matey, that'll be the weird part when they finally land and start walking around the surface of Mars. Yarr.

Moon, Mars and Beyond

[Anonymous Coward]

A policy of going to the moon then further makes sense with this technology, because you can build a reusable engine for the trip. As long as the engineering solid, it should last for a long time, and be adaptable. Plus a short trip to the moon is a good way to test it for a much more challenging journey.

Its about time they pulled out Orion. Its a solid idea that's worth a try and will hopefully lead to the first true (and permanent effectively) manned interplanetary spacecraft.

But hey, a robotic version would be a good idea as a preliminary test. Particularly as a reusable cargo vessel in future. We may need a lot of them.

Still a looong way off

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"The experiment validated the physical process behind the MMO concept, substantiating MMO's potential of enabling shorter interplanetary trip time for near-term space travel" - said AS&T Principal Investigator Ralph Ewig. "We are still far from constructing an actual vehicle, but the present research will chart the course for human missions to other planets in the near future."

With the average time between when space-related hardware is conceived and when it is finally developed and launched, I wouldn't expect to see one of these sitting on the launch pad until at least 2030. Considering that it's meant to carry humans and other specially-designed habitation hardware, that would push it back even further, maybe 2050 or beyond.

Mirror?

[msgtomatt]

The slashdot affect is in place ... has anyone found a mirror?

1.21 GIGAWATTS!!!

[Boomer954]

"This is it! This is the answer! It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at precisely 10:04 PM next Saturday Night! If we could somehow... harness this lightning; channel it into the Flux Capacitor, it just might work."

Nice design

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one hell of a lawn dart.

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[drseuk]

It looks like you're trying to eject a live nuclear bomb due to detonate in 2 seconds from the ship. As the ejection system is not Vista-certified, I thought I'd check if you really want to eject it as DOING SO MAY CAUSE INSTABILITY TO YOUR SYSTEM. # YES! YES! YES! Are you su ... Microsoft: "Where do you want to blow today?"

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[riffzifnab]

Yes, rocket jump to mars! I knew all those years of playing Team Fortress would get me into NASA one day.

What about an atomic-powered baidarka?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a bit of background on the original Orion concept, and an all-around interesting read, check out The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower.

Your Vision for Lewis and Clark?

[WED Fan]

The solar system is a big enough place for exploitation, and when we're done with the planets and their moons we can look at the Kuiper belt. That should keep us busy for the next couple of centuries...

And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to walk around the block of the White House, its plenty big, and there's probably a lot for you to see. When you're done with that, check out Virginia. Once that is done, I want a complete survey of everything east of the Mississippi. That should keep us busy for a century."

Lewis replied, "What about the vast unexplored reaches of the west?"

To which the President slammed his fist into the desk, "Slow down, Sparky, that would take lots of money that would be better spent on the vast wasteland of New Jersey. And, it would take a long time and nothing good would come of it, I'm sure. And, it would take you forever to get the results back to us. And, you'd smell when you got back. Hell, Clark smells already. Now, you guys do as I told you, none of that 'Vast Vision' stuff."

Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to taking a walk around the block.

"Besides," the President said, "When you finish up, you can both do commercials for Lost Horizon Airlines."

Hey, why does exploration have to be serial?

Re:Your Vision for Lewis and Clark?

[Ihlosi]

Hey, why does exploration have to be serial?

Exploitation happens where it's economically profitable. And unless we find something incredibly valuable or interesting in one of the nearby star systems (alien artifacts, life, habitable planets, chunks of antimatter ... right now I can's think of anything else that might warrant traveling a couple of light years for), exploitation is going to be constrained to the solar system for quite a while.

Prometheus was cancelled

[Alexpkeaton1010]

Sorry, Prometheus was canceled.

a bit longer

[Doc Ri]

In no time at all ... say a few thousand years we will have infested the whole galaxy

Not a bad idea, but I think you got the time frame wrong. The Milky Way has a diameter of 1E5 light years. Exponential growth of the number of ships does not allow you to cross that distance faster than a single ship. It only helps to cover more volume than a single or a few ships in a given time. If you start out in the centre of the Milky Way the lower limit for covering the whole would still be 5E4 years. This is assuming the ships are travelling at the speed of light. More realistically (if that makes any sense in this context) it would take something in the order of a million years. Of course, if you consider 1000 "a few", your estimate would be valid.

Not a Weapon

[WED Fan]

Orion operates by exploding a weapon...

Show me the weapon.

A laser pointed at someone with the intent to cause harm - Weapon.

A laser pointed out the backend of the space craft for propulsion - Engine.

A rocket launched into a schoolyard from a neighboring territory - Weapon.

A rocket strapped to a frame with wheels on a Utah salt flat - A really stupid but exhilorating way to die, and an Engine.

So, Einstein, show me the goddamned weapon ! Too many of you freaks out there saying, "We shouldn't...", "But there's a treaty...", and some such nonsense. But you are all for saying things like, "Well its a bad law or treaty," when its something that you want.

Show me the goddamned weapon!

Re:Not a Weapon

[Nyeerrmm]

I apologize for the imprecision of my language, like I stated in response to another poster, I believe the specific treaty that blocked further development was a ban on above-ground warhead detonations. The fact that there wasn't an altitude limit meant that it applied all the way out.

However, even if someone really wanted to enforce that now (I'm no expert on international law) I don't think this new version would really count as a warhead, since it's using externally driven magnets to compress the fissile material to critical, and also to contain that explosion and push it in a useful direction.

Re:Not a Weapon

[Anonymous Coward]

You're arguing over semantics. It makes no difference whether a machine gun is still a "weapon" if I take it into space and fire it to move forward- the intent is different but the object is the same. The treaty banned uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions above ground. Whatever they're being called or being used for.

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But that design wasn't scaled

[Crazy Taco]

Yes, we did see that article, but the prototype could barely produce enough thrust to push a peice of paper, if that, and to power a spacecraft to mars in a week it was going to have to be scaled up to a point that some think is impractical. This design has a much greater chance of being usable and production ready in the near future.

Really Smart

[popejeremy]

What a good idea. Of course, if the nuclear powered shuttle encounters technical difficulties and (worst case scenario) explodes in flight, the atomic bomb fallout could kill millions of people.

But what am I worried about? It's not like a space shuttle has ever exploded. These things are safe, right?

*Your* Vision for Lewis and Clark.

[pavon]

And the President said, "Lewis, Clark, I want you to go explore the moon. The country needs inspiration and I am going to provide it for them"

Lewis replied, "But, sir we have no way to get to the moon. Why don't we explore all that land out west that we just purchased. Few if any european has ever seen it. Meanwhile we can learn more about the moon with new telescopes, which will make us more prepared if we ever do go there."

To which the president slammed his fist into the desk, "You have no vision! Besides, building telescopes and taking long trips like that would actually cost real money. I want you to work on some inexpensive pipe-dream that sounds good in political speeches, feasibility be damned."

Knowing they were beat, Lewis and Clark resigned themselves to designing successively large cannons. The never reached the moon, and the midwest filled out slowly, but few ever crossed the rockies, much to the delight of the native tribes, who were successful in fighting off the settlers for quite some time. Until the large cannons came of course :)

Re:Also Homer Simpson is the Safety Inspector for

[Anonymous Coward]

NU-CU-LAR. It's pronounced NU-CU-LAR.

What happens when...

[R3d Jack]

the spacecraft runs into an object the size of a dime while traveling at 1/10c?

Re:What happens when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Point, I was about to make the same statement. At that speed just passing through some space dust could spell certain doom

The engine shoulder mounted becomes....

[bodland]

The BFG9000!!!

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[SpooForBrains]

So THAT'S what those noises at the beginning of Serenity are ...

I proposed this many years ago

[Iowan41]

No doubt archival internet sites will bear this out. I probably first mentioned it on GEnie, before the web, though.

I'm still searching.

[vimh42]

Can you tell me where to find the nukeweer wessels? The nuke-we-er wess-sels. Hey, I'm talking to you!

We have the theology, we have the technology

[Iowan41]

The religious duty is right there in the creation mandate in Christian theology. Not to mention making the desert bloom. Last time I checked, Mars was a desert. Mars ought to have uranium deposits. Volcanic activity plus long-term thermal water features (and Mars has lots of water) should result in the deposit of veins of uranium salts, as well as all sorts of metal salts and metal sulfates (yellow cake?). That's mostly how it happened on Earth, but on Mars, the volcanoes tend to stay put. That would result in the deposits being localized and much larger. We've imaged hydrologically-produced veins from orbit with Mars Recon. So that process does/did occur. I am amazed by how many slashdotters don't have the foggiest notion of how fission explosions happen, or how this rocket engine works. They keep thinking that it would blow up. What if the sun blows up, guys? Or the oceans, I mean there's all that deuterium in the oceans and that is nookleear fuel!?

correct me if i'm wrong

[cjdkoh]

but isn't this similar to the engine of a firefly class spaceship?

The moon?

[Gorimek]

Isn't the moon believed to be spun off from the same blob of magma as the earth? If so, it should have the same ratio of Uranium as this mud ball, and zero environmental concerns.

I'd think a moon satellite could detect surface deposits from it's radiation?

Women Astronauts!

[Anonymous Coward]

As might be well unknown to most Slashdotters, many women really like a good pounding!

Oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you like to wake up one morning and find your credit rating slashed?

Yes and No

[tjstork]

Isn't the moon believed to be spun off from the same blob of magma as the earth? If so, it should have the same ratio of Uranium as this mud ball, and zero environmental concerns.

The moon is believed to be spun off from the same magnum blob as the earth, but I think the simulations predicted that the moon actually would get all the junky stuff, and the earth would get all the good stuff. So, from what I understand, most of the heavy elements wound up on the earth, and the moon gets mostly crap.

I talked to a geologist about mining once, and he said that water was a sort of prerequisite to get concentrated ore deposits. For example, you get some rock that has some level of gold in it, and its exposed to a water flow for many thousands of years, and the gold washes out, and being heavier, concentrates in places. Then, it gets buried up good, and we go get it.

Re:What about the surging nature of the propuslion

[Eclipse-now]

An WHUMP Orion WHUMP based WHUMP drive WHUMP can WHUMP be a WHUMP bit WHUMP rough, WHUMP any WHUMP study WHUMP on the WHUMP effects WHUMP on cargo/passWHUMPengers?

Didn't they try this at the end of Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall"? How did they put it...

"God was knocking on the door, and He wanted in, and He wanted in BAD!"

mini mag orion might be exactly what we need.

[Criton]

This is the propulsion holy grail we have been looking for high ISP plus high thrust.
Also a zpinch device to make sub critical fission assemblies under go fission would not have to be any where near as powerful as the Sandia Z machine.
This or vasimr or nuclear thermo is how we'll get to mars and beyond.
On the subject anti nuclear in space views the cold hard facts are with out nuclear power and or propulsion in space human space flight will never progress beyond the moon and close NEOs.