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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."
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...
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?
...I think someone forgot to tell the sun.
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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you unscrew the cap in the stern of the spacecraft, you will find a spare nuclear reactor behind the battery terminal.
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?
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.
How do deal with all those explosions in your car engine?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Table-ized A.I.
You mean like a plutonium powered vehicle?
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Table-ized A.I.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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.
Then the winter came, and the Grasshopper died. And the Octopus ate all his acorns. Also, he got a racecar.
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?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
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 ;)
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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
This is my sig.
fixed
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.
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).
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.