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Nuclear Rocket Petition On White House Website
RocketAcademy writes "A petition on the White House website is calling for the United States to rapidly develop a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Nuclear rockets are a promising technology, but unless NASA develops a deep-space exploration ship such as Johnson Space Center's Nautilus X, a nuclear rocket would be wasted. Launching nuclear rockets may pose regulatory and political problems as well. Practical applications may depend on mining uranium or thorium on the Moon."
Like free hookers / pot?
The NERVA test engine is on display at Johnson Space Center, as I understand it.
Being 40+ years out of date, I imagine they'll have to spend billions to repeat the original work, but I'd hope that the fact that we already built a working nuclear rocket would mean that developing a new one wouldn't be overwhelmingly difficult.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
In this case I believe the judgement of professionals at NASA is worth more than of some random petition signers. Give NASA a bigger budget and let them decide how to spend it.
Nuclear rockets have a much higher specific impulse than chemical rockets, which is what makes them attractive for space exploration (this is not the only thing to consider though). However launching them from earth would poses some risks. A failure on launch could result in releasing radioactive fission products over large areas. The US and USSR did a good bit of research on these decades ago. Some interesting info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I would really like to be able to vote against some of the stupid ideas on the White House web site. It would help to have a crowd function to weed out some of the wackier ideas.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This.
Seriously, anyone who thinks the white house actually considers any of these petitions is incredibly naive and impressionable, which is, of course, the whole point - making a bunch of naive, impressionable voters believe the administration actually gives a fuck what they think.
Being 40+ years out of date, I imagine they'll have to spend billions to repeat the original work, but I'd hope that the fact that we already built a working nuclear rocket would mean that developing a new one wouldn't be overwhelmingly difficult.
If you hire big bloated corrupt incompetent defense contractors it is guaranteed to take longer than the original and costs BILLIONS more:
Remember that all the above was in response to the destruction of Orbiter Columbia during reentry ten years ago. Oh, for Constellation haters: the Ares-I 1st stage now exists (ATK has test fired several of them and has essentially finished it .... they are just optimizing and characterizing now) and it will fly as part of the SLS system...... now if we just had an Orion and an upperstage with a J-2 derived engine......
The nuclear engine is a great thing..... we developed it in the sixties and even ran them at a test site in the desert..... but if you hire some big aerospace corporation that has been sucking on the government teet for decades and is used to delivering defective garbage to the taxpayer, demanding more for that garbage than was originally bid, and being rewarded by being offered new projects ..... well you're just gonna spend billions and either get nothing or get junk. (the normal pattern is that you spend billions and years and then eventually cancel the program so the taxpayers get nothing for the money but a few desktop display models...... google X-20, X-33, X-38, OTV, NASP, A-12 ....)
Nuclear Thermal Rockets can have a higher efficiency than than conventional chemical rockets, but it's not as much as you might think. There's a limitation that to have a higher exhaust velocity in a thermal rocket, the exhaust needs to be hotter. And it can only be so much hotter before your reactor starts becoming molten rather than a solid. Which means that efficiency tops out at a bit less than double the exhaust velocity of conventional rockets.
Now, that's still useful, if you can get enough thrust to get up off of the planet (and to overcome the weight of the reactor in the process), then you might be able to lift quite a bit more into orbit. Except the petition is for an NTR that would only operate in space. And in space, where you don't really have to worry about the amount of thrust, and your speed is limited by your fuel and your exhaust velocity, things like ion drives can reach efficiencies an order of magnitude higher, or more. Which means, an NTR in space only wouldn't be as useful, compared to nuclear-electric or solar-electric propulsion.
I suppose an NTR not used for Earth surface to orbit might still be useful in landing or taking off from other objects. Really, that's where its strength would be, if you can get it to have high enough thrust, then it would be useful for getting things into orbit and back, as a surface-to-orbit ship. But as far as orbit-to-orbit ships go, ion drives and other electric propulsion can get a lot more speed out of the same tank of propellant.
But it is quite a bit more than that in countries south of UK! Especially if you have air conditioning, the traditional light bulbs put you in the absurd situation of using energy both to heat and cool the room at the same time... Another thing is that the light bulbs in typical lighting fixtures are inefficient as heaters. Most of the heat goes and stays near the ceiling, which is not where most people spend their time. Even ignoring that, direct electric heating is usually more expensive than other heat sources. (This of course depends on where you live).
By the way, I'm from Finland, so from my point of view the UK is one of those balmy southern European countries. And I have gradually replaced most of the bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents and LEDs. The latter have come down in price in recent years, and solve the worst annoyance of compact fluorescents: they turn instantly on with full power.