How about putting the blame where it belongs, with shitty humans doing shitty things?
Sure. Bad people do bad things. But crazy beliefs make good people do bad things.
Trivial example, young Mormons are supposed to do "missionary" work, which generally involves them going door-to-door annoying people. Can you accept that by angering hundreds of people, day after day, you personally are making the world a worse place? Many Mormons feel that too. (I've heard some talk about the doubts they had while doing this, and the lack of effectiveness.) So why do these good people do something they feel is bad? Because it's part of their religion. That's it. If it wasn't part of their religion, they'd stop. If the central Temple said it's no longer required, they stop.
What concerns atheists is that religion essentially praises and rewards irrational beliefs. And that seems like a bad habit to get into.
Don't forget Yoda who hid in a forest rather than train up new Jedi to assist the rebellion.
[This is made worse by the prequels (isn't everything), since there's a machine that can read your Jedi-potential. Meaning that over the 18 years since Revenge of the Sith, Yoda & Obi-Wan could have had a hundred non-Jedi agents out quietly testing kids across the galaxy for Jedi-potential, steering them to Dagobah for training.]
1. Explain what happens when we die. 2. Describe in detail the physics involved beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
I'm puzzled what you think you are proving. Science doesn't know what happens inside a black hole, therefore... science is religion?
Unlike a religion, scientists admit they don't know what happens inside a black hole. They don't have unevidenced faith in what happens inside a black hole.
Even the theorists who are trying to come up with ideas of what's happening inside a black hole know damn well that their theories are nothing unless they can come up with a way of gathering evidence to differentiate between the rival theories. They don't come up with a theory and then stop looking because they have Faith in the Answer. [Actually, some do. But they stick out precisely because it is so un-science-like. For example, that's why we call climate deniers, "deniers" not "skeptics".]
Hitler was a known proponent of eugenics.
This is even weirder. Hitler was a raving nutter, therefore... religion is good?
Consider Pascal's wager. Even if there is no God, what is the harm in society practicing Christian beliefs?
What if the is a god, but not a Christian God?
Pascal's Wager only works if there isn't a god. If there is a god, but you pick the wrong religion, you're just as boned as if you simply don't believe. If multiple religions claim to be True, and none can offer real evidence, logically you should believe in none of them.
Hell, even if it is the God of the Christian bible, but the stuff that Christian ignore in the OT really are important (Suffer not a witch to live, shellfish is an abomination, if a farmer mixes two types of crop he is to be stoned to death, do not take the Lord's name in vain.. etc etc.)
I really hope you are not one of those that claims science solved the question
There are many literal claims made by many religions, in regard to Creation or their own subsequent history, which have been shown to be false.
For example, in the Christian (and Hebrew) bible: We know that young Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis is not possible. We know that not just the date, but even the pattern of creation is Genesis isn't what happened. We know that there is no sign of the events in Exodus (not the ten plagues, nor the escaping slaves, nor the Red Sea parting) in spite the Egyptians meticulously recording other such events (plagues, escaping slaves, weird events). Likewise the slaughter of the First Born in Jesus' time. We know that many of the battles in the bible didn't happen or couldn't have happened as written (the "Walls" of Jericho, for example). We know Jerusalem at the supposed time of David was a goat-village, not a major power as claimed. We know that much of the OT was not written when it was claimed, and can't go back beyond 800-900BC (and probably dates to around 700BC), due to references not matching actual history. (Even small things, like the foundation story of Abraham having pack-camels, which weren't domesticated until before 1000BC.)
Essentially whenever religions make factual, testable claims, they almost always turn out to be false. (So often, in fact, that finding a true claim in a religion or myth is really interesting and unusual.)
The FBI did a study where they took a large number of fingerprints (fifty thousand, IIRC) from their database and fed them back in. They got close to 100% match. They routinely regurgitate this as proof that fingerprint databases are near-foolproof.
Problem is they took copies of the highest quality fingerprints (those taken at arrest) and compared them to the same scans. It's like testing whether a neural-net AI can recognise dogs vs horses in pictures by showing the same images you used to train it (not even fresh scans of the same pictures, but the same digital files, pixel-for-pixel.) Now imagine imprisoning or even executing people based on that system.
What they've never done is compare more realistic crime-scene quality fingerprints from volunteers known to be or not-be on a database.
There have, however, been many cases of convictions based on fingerprint evidence being later over-turned by DNA evidence. There are also many cases where people were fingerprinted and the system linked them to someone else already on the system, being forced through the long and painful process of proving they are not that other guy.
Swatch time (beats) is stupid. Better to simply decimalise the day. Using Japanese/computer date-format, you would have a time-stamp that is 2014/10/26.58194... to as many or as few significant digits as you choose.
And yet Boeing is having to hire Blue Turd to develop their next family of large rocket engines for the USAF.
It seems that the much vaunted "experienced" players don't know how to build new rocket engines any more, whereas the non-show vanity project has actually designed and built new generation rocket engines within living memory. (LM is even worse, they have to use surplus Russian engines.) Meanwhile, the first SLS launches will reuse the 25yr old engines off the retired shuttle orbiters; not "engines of the same design", the actual engines pulled off the last three orbiters, burning them up on the first two flights (2017, 2021. No further launches are funded.)
Orion is a poor design, with no mission. The mission it was design for (lunar orbit) is no longer the national goal, and it's completely unsuited to the mission that is the national goal (BEO). It's over-weight, over-priced, and behind schedule.
SLS is a terrible design with no mission beyond its own existence, and is just appallingly overpriced. Boeing is receiving $2.8b for the first two SLS first-stages, in spite of them just being extended shuttle ET's with those recycled SSMEs attached. That's in addition to prior funding Boeing received for designs, reviews, production changes, etc. Just the unit cost. $1.4b each. For just the first stage. This is when NASA projected the SLS launch costs would be $650m per unit for the whole system, including integration and launch ops.
This came up with Orion in the Ares I design. When solids are breached — either intentionally by range-safety or on-board abort systems, or due to the failure itself — they release a cloud of burning solid fuel debris. With a breach of liquid fuel tanks, such as the shuttle ET, you do get that big pretty fireball, but the actual heat being produced is fairly trivial; so as long as you are beyond the over-pressure wave, you are golden. Burning solid fuel is hot particles, when you pass back through the debris cloud, at the very least your parachute will melt and possibly the capsule itself will be damaged.
(At a more human scale, it's like the difference between getting that whumph of gas fireball from starting your gas griller, versus getting sprayed with burning oil. Accept that solid rocket fuel is more like thermite.)
In order to get far enough away from the solid rocket debris cloud, you need a monster LAS with monster acceleration. That results in a LAS as heavy as the capsule itself. And since Orion is already an over-size, over-weight capsule...
I wonder what the trade is like between acres of cooling vanes vs. acres of solar panels. I guess it would depend on the efficiency of both.
In space, in a vacuum, studies apparently have shown that solar wins for the inner solar system. (And that's solar panels winning just compared to the reactor mass. Adding the radiator issue makes them win further out.)
On Mars, solar probably wins in terms of pure power/mass ratio, but solar requires storage for night power (so nearly double the panel area, plus the mass of the battery system) and extra power for heating (which the reactor gives you for free.) And in winter, the numbers get worse.
Same for the moon, except near the poles. With 24hr (or close to it) sunlight, solar wins. Anywhere else, nukes rule.
Mars's atmosphere is thin, but the temperature is very cold... seems like there ought to be a way to take advantage of that.
I was being dismissive: in reality a small reactor suitable for a base wouldn't need much cooling on Mars; after all, we're not talking gigawatt scale plants. So a small set of radiators — sticking up vertically, angled perpendicular to the path of the summer sun — would be plenty. But even that may nor be necessary, you'd use the waste heat for heating the base itself, then the lower grade heat for a greenhouse. At that point, the surface area is probably great enough for the atmosphere to carry the heat away without any special radiators.
[That atmosphere on Mars is annoying. It's too thin to be useful, but thick enough to get in the way. So it can carry enough heat away to make solar heating barely enough to keep greenhouses warm during the day, and at night (and in winter) you'd need loads of extra heating. Mars makes it hard to put up a freakin' greenhouse. And people want to live there.]
The space shuttle was a 100+ ton space-plane launched on a Saturn V class launcher. Built without any real precursors, from 1970s technology. Every aspect of it pushed the technology beyond the state-of-the-art. No part of it was built to reduce operating costs. The original proposal sold to Nixon may have been to develop a low cost "space truck", but that was never part of the actual program development goals.
OTOH, Falcon 9 was intended solely to be cheap. And is already the cheapest launcher on the market as an expendable. Even partial reusability (first stage) is expected to lower launch costs significantly. Musk claims that launch operations costs are a small part of his launch costs, and even that will probably drop once his team controls their own site and range.
This gets back to moving away from the "standing army" model of spaceflight operations.
And the radiators must be protected behind a heavy shield, because the radiation degrades them too quickly. Most designs have the reactor, then a heavy shield, a long truss and then the rest of the ship. Running down the length of the truss, carefully shaped to remain in the shadow of the shield, you have huge radiators to dump the heat from the reactor. The truss, the radiators and the shield are all additional mass required for a nuclear propulsion on top of the reactor mass. Solar arrays require radiators too, but only a fraction of the size, see the ISS.
In a way they did. They sent expendable seamen and some Italian loudmouth on a few small off-the-shelf commercial ships. Only when the destination was proven did they risk their more valuable people on more valuable ships.
that only puts a few hundred to at most a thousand-plus kg of payload on the moon per flight.
You're doing it wrong. With reusable launchers you want to split your payloads into cargo and fuel, launched separately. Most products have a U or J shaped reliability curve. Higher failure rate at the beginning, picking up manufacturing defects, then lower failure rate until end-of-life effects start to accumulate. Because fuel is cheap, you put that on the brand new, untested reusable launchers, and on the end-of-life launchers and fly them until they die. Because cargo is generally not cheap, you use the in-between launchers, at their peak reliability.
You put your cargo and TLI-engines into LEO on the most reliable launchers using the payload full capacity of your launcher, then you add fuel tanks and associated plumbing on the less reliable launchers, finally you launch bulk propellant on the lowest reliability launchers. Then you launch these large payloads from LEO. You lose some Oberth efficiencies, but you gain in using your launcher's maximum lifespan, and being able to launch larger individual payloads (in the 10-12 tonne range for F9, 50 tonne range for FH, and 250 tonne range for the Raptor-based MCT.)
No form of currently-achievable propulsion yields a higher Isp than a fission fragment rocket
We're so far from FFR, we might as well talk about fusion drives, or Harold White's warp drive.
and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)
My previous comments apply to NEP vs SEP. SEP has better power/mass ratios until you are somewhere near Jupiter, and realistically probably somewhere past Jupiter.
I've never understood this argument. By definition, you are saying that everything that is available to these private players was already available to NASA and its primary contractors.
So why is that a justification for minimising the achievements of the new guys? "Yeah, we could have done that. We didn't, but we totally could have." No, no you couldn't. You had decades to do it, your whole job was to do it, you had billions in funding to do it, your primary contractors are orders of magnitude larger than the new players, and yet you didn't do it.
Worse. Even after the new guys did it, you still aren't doing it.
For example, Boeing is getting a multi-billion dollar USAF contract to develop a new large methane engine. They got the contract because of their "decades of experience". Aaaand... they are sub-contracting the actual work to Blue Origin, a dot-com billionaire's tiny little hobby-project which has spent the last decade actually building new rocket engines. But hey, it's the new guys who are leaching off the old players. Sure.
Most things can be broken down into sub-100 tonne parts. The problem is not the launch, at least once we stop throwing away our rockets, it's the cost of on-orbit operations. That requires a change in how we work. Ending the standing armies on the ground to support every spanner-turn in space.
Trade studies have suggested that out to the main asteroid belt, aerospace grade solar panels have a higher power/mass ratio than nuclear systems. Only out near Jupiter does the equation shift (but even that is only counting the direct reactor mass. The added mass of shielding, trusses for distance, etc, is usually not included.) And every year, the cross-over distance shifts further out.
The exception is where sunlight is unavailable — Lunar night, Mars winter — where the length of darkness exceeds likely storage capacity. However, the most likely location for early development on the moon is the poles, where there are Peaks of Eternal Light. (How can you not capitalise that?) OTOH, for Mars, you are probably going to avoid the poles due to the severity of those winters, staying within 30 deg of the equator, avoiding that problem too.
So it'll be a fair while before we need nukes, better to focus available funding on something else.
Slashdot Mirror
How about putting the blame where it belongs, with shitty humans doing shitty things?
Sure. Bad people do bad things. But crazy beliefs make good people do bad things.
Trivial example, young Mormons are supposed to do "missionary" work, which generally involves them going door-to-door annoying people. Can you accept that by angering hundreds of people, day after day, you personally are making the world a worse place? Many Mormons feel that too. (I've heard some talk about the doubts they had while doing this, and the lack of effectiveness.) So why do these good people do something they feel is bad? Because it's part of their religion. That's it. If it wasn't part of their religion, they'd stop. If the central Temple said it's no longer required, they stop.
What concerns atheists is that religion essentially praises and rewards irrational beliefs. And that seems like a bad habit to get into.
Don't forget Yoda who hid in a forest rather than train up new Jedi to assist the rebellion.
[This is made worse by the prequels (isn't everything), since there's a machine that can read your Jedi-potential. Meaning that over the 18 years since Revenge of the Sith, Yoda & Obi-Wan could have had a hundred non-Jedi agents out quietly testing kids across the galaxy for Jedi-potential, steering them to Dagobah for training.]
1. Explain what happens when we die.
2. Describe in detail the physics involved beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
I'm puzzled what you think you are proving. Science doesn't know what happens inside a black hole, therefore... science is religion?
Unlike a religion, scientists admit they don't know what happens inside a black hole. They don't have unevidenced faith in what happens inside a black hole.
Even the theorists who are trying to come up with ideas of what's happening inside a black hole know damn well that their theories are nothing unless they can come up with a way of gathering evidence to differentiate between the rival theories. They don't come up with a theory and then stop looking because they have Faith in the Answer. [Actually, some do. But they stick out precisely because it is so un-science-like. For example, that's why we call climate deniers, "deniers" not "skeptics".]
Hitler was a known proponent of eugenics.
This is even weirder. Hitler was a raving nutter, therefore... religion is good?
3. How does gravity work?
It sucks.
As do your arguments.
When you marry you express faith and trust in your spouse.
Nope. I'm gonna check whether they actually exist before I propose.
(Fool me once...)
What if the is a god
Curses!
Consider Pascal's wager. Even if there is no God, what is the harm in society practicing Christian beliefs?
What if the is a god, but not a Christian God?
Pascal's Wager only works if there isn't a god. If there is a god, but you pick the wrong religion, you're just as boned as if you simply don't believe. If multiple religions claim to be True, and none can offer real evidence, logically you should believe in none of them.
Hell, even if it is the God of the Christian bible, but the stuff that Christian ignore in the OT really are important (Suffer not a witch to live, shellfish is an abomination, if a farmer mixes two types of crop he is to be stoned to death, do not take the Lord's name in vain.. etc etc.)
I really hope you are not one of those that claims science solved the question
There are many literal claims made by many religions, in regard to Creation or their own subsequent history, which have been shown to be false.
For example, in the Christian (and Hebrew) bible: We know that young Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis is not possible. We know that not just the date, but even the pattern of creation is Genesis isn't what happened. We know that there is no sign of the events in Exodus (not the ten plagues, nor the escaping slaves, nor the Red Sea parting) in spite the Egyptians meticulously recording other such events (plagues, escaping slaves, weird events). Likewise the slaughter of the First Born in Jesus' time. We know that many of the battles in the bible didn't happen or couldn't have happened as written (the "Walls" of Jericho, for example). We know Jerusalem at the supposed time of David was a goat-village, not a major power as claimed. We know that much of the OT was not written when it was claimed, and can't go back beyond 800-900BC (and probably dates to around 700BC), due to references not matching actual history. (Even small things, like the foundation story of Abraham having pack-camels, which weren't domesticated until before 1000BC.)
Essentially whenever religions make factual, testable claims, they almost always turn out to be false. (So often, in fact, that finding a true claim in a religion or myth is really interesting and unusual.)
The FBI did a study where they took a large number of fingerprints (fifty thousand, IIRC) from their database and fed them back in. They got close to 100% match. They routinely regurgitate this as proof that fingerprint databases are near-foolproof.
Problem is they took copies of the highest quality fingerprints (those taken at arrest) and compared them to the same scans. It's like testing whether a neural-net AI can recognise dogs vs horses in pictures by showing the same images you used to train it (not even fresh scans of the same pictures, but the same digital files, pixel-for-pixel.) Now imagine imprisoning or even executing people based on that system.
What they've never done is compare more realistic crime-scene quality fingerprints from volunteers known to be or not-be on a database.
There have, however, been many cases of convictions based on fingerprint evidence being later over-turned by DNA evidence. There are also many cases where people were fingerprinted and the system linked them to someone else already on the system, being forced through the long and painful process of proving they are not that other guy.
As of yet, a Jedi hasn't suicide bombed a girls school.
A long time ago one of them murdered a large number of children at a Jedi private school.
Swatch time (beats) is stupid. Better to simply decimalise the day. Using Japanese/computer date-format, you would have a time-stamp that is 2014/10/26.58194... to as many or as few significant digits as you choose.
Accept that solid rocket fuel is more like thermite.
Yes, do accept that.
an answer to the growing threat posed by plastic firearms
It stops people being hysterical and stupid about non-issues?
And yet Boeing is having to hire Blue Turd to develop their next family of large rocket engines for the USAF.
It seems that the much vaunted "experienced" players don't know how to build new rocket engines any more, whereas the non-show vanity project has actually designed and built new generation rocket engines within living memory. (LM is even worse, they have to use surplus Russian engines.) Meanwhile, the first SLS launches will reuse the 25yr old engines off the retired shuttle orbiters; not "engines of the same design", the actual engines pulled off the last three orbiters, burning them up on the first two flights (2017, 2021. No further launches are funded.)
Orion is a poor design, with no mission. The mission it was design for (lunar orbit) is no longer the national goal, and it's completely unsuited to the mission that is the national goal (BEO). It's over-weight, over-priced, and behind schedule.
SLS is a terrible design with no mission beyond its own existence, and is just appallingly overpriced. Boeing is receiving $2.8b for the first two SLS first-stages, in spite of them just being extended shuttle ET's with those recycled SSMEs attached. That's in addition to prior funding Boeing received for designs, reviews, production changes, etc. Just the unit cost. $1.4b each. For just the first stage. This is when NASA projected the SLS launch costs would be $650m per unit for the whole system, including integration and launch ops.
This came up with Orion in the Ares I design. When solids are breached — either intentionally by range-safety or on-board abort systems, or due to the failure itself — they release a cloud of burning solid fuel debris. With a breach of liquid fuel tanks, such as the shuttle ET, you do get that big pretty fireball, but the actual heat being produced is fairly trivial; so as long as you are beyond the over-pressure wave, you are golden. Burning solid fuel is hot particles, when you pass back through the debris cloud, at the very least your parachute will melt and possibly the capsule itself will be damaged.
(At a more human scale, it's like the difference between getting that whumph of gas fireball from starting your gas griller, versus getting sprayed with burning oil. Accept that solid rocket fuel is more like thermite.)
In order to get far enough away from the solid rocket debris cloud, you need a monster LAS with monster acceleration. That results in a LAS as heavy as the capsule itself. And since Orion is already an over-size, over-weight capsule...
I wonder what the trade is like between acres of cooling vanes vs. acres of solar panels. I guess it would depend on the efficiency of both.
In space, in a vacuum, studies apparently have shown that solar wins for the inner solar system. (And that's solar panels winning just compared to the reactor mass. Adding the radiator issue makes them win further out.)
On Mars, solar probably wins in terms of pure power/mass ratio, but solar requires storage for night power (so nearly double the panel area, plus the mass of the battery system) and extra power for heating (which the reactor gives you for free.) And in winter, the numbers get worse.
Same for the moon, except near the poles. With 24hr (or close to it) sunlight, solar wins. Anywhere else, nukes rule.
Mars's atmosphere is thin, but the temperature is very cold... seems like there ought to be a way to take advantage of that.
I was being dismissive: in reality a small reactor suitable for a base wouldn't need much cooling on Mars; after all, we're not talking gigawatt scale plants. So a small set of radiators — sticking up vertically, angled perpendicular to the path of the summer sun — would be plenty. But even that may nor be necessary, you'd use the waste heat for heating the base itself, then the lower grade heat for a greenhouse. At that point, the surface area is probably great enough for the atmosphere to carry the heat away without any special radiators.
[That atmosphere on Mars is annoying. It's too thin to be useful, but thick enough to get in the way. So it can carry enough heat away to make solar heating barely enough to keep greenhouses warm during the day, and at night (and in winter) you'd need loads of extra heating. Mars makes it hard to put up a freakin' greenhouse. And people want to live there.]
OTOH, on Mars you've got an atmosphere,
Barely.
so this wouldn't be a problem anyway.
Even on Earth we have cooling towers.
But eventually large-scale power will be needed in the outer solar system. I suppose by then we'll have figured out fusion or something like that.
At the very least, we'll have a better idea what our real needs are. Right now we're like Christopher Columbus trying to design the NY subway system.
The space shuttle was a 100+ ton space-plane launched on a Saturn V class launcher. Built without any real precursors, from 1970s technology. Every aspect of it pushed the technology beyond the state-of-the-art. No part of it was built to reduce operating costs. The original proposal sold to Nixon may have been to develop a low cost "space truck", but that was never part of the actual program development goals.
OTOH, Falcon 9 was intended solely to be cheap. And is already the cheapest launcher on the market as an expendable. Even partial reusability (first stage) is expected to lower launch costs significantly. Musk claims that launch operations costs are a small part of his launch costs, and even that will probably drop once his team controls their own site and range.
This gets back to moving away from the "standing army" model of spaceflight operations.
Very large radiators.
And the radiators must be protected behind a heavy shield, because the radiation degrades them too quickly. Most designs have the reactor, then a heavy shield, a long truss and then the rest of the ship. Running down the length of the truss, carefully shaped to remain in the shadow of the shield, you have huge radiators to dump the heat from the reactor. The truss, the radiators and the shield are all additional mass required for a nuclear propulsion on top of the reactor mass. Solar arrays require radiators too, but only a fraction of the size, see the ISS.
In a way they did. They sent expendable seamen and some Italian loudmouth on a few small off-the-shelf commercial ships. Only when the destination was proven did they risk their more valuable people on more valuable ships.
the robots send us a message that says "Everything is ready. We are waiting to meet you all for dinner."
Ummm...
Anyone see a problem with this?
...yeah...
where all the people and things are?
That's the problem. You can't experiment where people live, or where there are things you care about.
You're doing it wrong. With reusable launchers you want to split your payloads into cargo and fuel, launched separately. Most products have a U or J shaped reliability curve. Higher failure rate at the beginning, picking up manufacturing defects, then lower failure rate until end-of-life effects start to accumulate. Because fuel is cheap, you put that on the brand new, untested reusable launchers, and on the end-of-life launchers and fly them until they die. Because cargo is generally not cheap, you use the in-between launchers, at their peak reliability.
You put your cargo and TLI-engines into LEO on the most reliable launchers using the payload full capacity of your launcher, then you add fuel tanks and associated plumbing on the less reliable launchers, finally you launch bulk propellant on the lowest reliability launchers. Then you launch these large payloads from LEO. You lose some Oberth efficiencies, but you gain in using your launcher's maximum lifespan, and being able to launch larger individual payloads (in the 10-12 tonne range for F9, 50 tonne range for FH, and 250 tonne range for the Raptor-based MCT.)
We're so far from FFR, we might as well talk about fusion drives, or Harold White's warp drive.
and a few other space options (such as a nuclear VASIMR-like mode)
My previous comments apply to NEP vs SEP. SEP has better power/mass ratios until you are somewhere near Jupiter, and realistically probably somewhere past Jupiter.
... using NASA designs as the foundation.
I've never understood this argument. By definition, you are saying that everything that is available to these private players was already available to NASA and its primary contractors.
So why is that a justification for minimising the achievements of the new guys? "Yeah, we could have done that. We didn't, but we totally could have." No, no you couldn't. You had decades to do it, your whole job was to do it, you had billions in funding to do it, your primary contractors are orders of magnitude larger than the new players, and yet you didn't do it.
Worse. Even after the new guys did it, you still aren't doing it.
For example, Boeing is getting a multi-billion dollar USAF contract to develop a new large methane engine. They got the contract because of their "decades of experience". Aaaand... they are sub-contracting the actual work to Blue Origin, a dot-com billionaire's tiny little hobby-project which has spent the last decade actually building new rocket engines. But hey, it's the new guys who are leaching off the old players. Sure.
Most things can be broken down into sub-100 tonne parts. The problem is not the launch, at least once we stop throwing away our rockets, it's the cost of on-orbit operations. That requires a change in how we work. Ending the standing armies on the ground to support every spanner-turn in space.
Trade studies have suggested that out to the main asteroid belt, aerospace grade solar panels have a higher power/mass ratio than nuclear systems. Only out near Jupiter does the equation shift (but even that is only counting the direct reactor mass. The added mass of shielding, trusses for distance, etc, is usually not included.) And every year, the cross-over distance shifts further out.
The exception is where sunlight is unavailable — Lunar night, Mars winter — where the length of darkness exceeds likely storage capacity. However, the most likely location for early development on the moon is the poles, where there are Peaks of Eternal Light. (How can you not capitalise that?) OTOH, for Mars, you are probably going to avoid the poles due to the severity of those winters, staying within 30 deg of the equator, avoiding that problem too.
So it'll be a fair while before we need nukes, better to focus available funding on something else.