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."

Comments

Why not have a petition for something USEFUL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like free hookers / pot?

Can I vote against this?

[mspohr]

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.

Re:stahp

[EmagGeek]

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.

If you hire corrupt defense contractors....

[Anonymous Coward]

Being 40+ years out of date, I imagine they'll have to spend billions to repeat the original work, but I'd hope that the fact that we already built a working nuclear rocket would mean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:

1. [a] The Apollo capsule, recreated as Orion/MPCV is an example. Yeah, I know Orion is bigger, but the shape is the same (because that was supposed to save time and money by allowing them to re-use the original test and flight data). Some uniformed idiot (or drone working for one of the contractors) will point out that Orion seats 4 while Apollo seated 3 but there are some facts to consider: As part of Constellation, Orion was supposed to carry a crew of 6, which 40 years of progress should have enabled (Remember: the massive power-hungry avionics can now run on a small battery and be the size of an Android Tablet) but apparently today's Lockheed is less capable than NorthAmerican was 40 years ago. One Apollo capsule rolled-out to the pad with seats for 5 (and blueprints of NorthAmerican's Apollo show it was capable of fitting 6 ) ... google "Skylab Rescue Mission" and you'll probable stumble onto the details ..... the 5-seat rescue mission was not needed so it did not launch in that config but it was capable and the configuration was real.
2. [b] The Saturn-IB, recreated as Ares-I is another example. Sure, replacing the 1st stage of 8 liquid engines with an nearly existing current tech shuttle SRB was a chore ..... but Von Braun's team studied the same basic idea in the 60's as an upgrade path of the smaller crew-launch Saturn (so the idea was not exotic and unstudied). Forty years of progress should have made this a no-brainer. The oft-cited excuse for cancellation: thrust oscillation was hardly an unexpected or misunderstood thing and turned-out to be less severe than critics predicted. The upper-stage of Ares-I was essentially a Saturn S-IVB (LOX/LH2, common-bulkhead single-engine design) using an updated version of the Apollo J-2 engine (designated J-2X). Boeing apparently was incapable of re-creating what NorthAmerican could do 40 years ago with the basic stage structure. Did we even get a boilerplate version of the stage for our tax dollars?
3. [c] After billions of dollars and years of work the new J-2X engine (derived from the Apollo J-2) is still in development. In the Apollo era, by this point in the program the J-2 design was already flying .... and it was not derived from any previous engine

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 ....)

Not very useful the way it's worded.

[Soralin]

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.