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coenhyde | 3 years ago

Can we develop a nuclear salt water rocket already?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

Scott Manley video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvZjhWE-3zM

Basically a controlled thermo nuclear reaction blasting out the back.

"One design would generate 13 meganewtons of thrust at 66 km/s exhaust velocity (or 6,730 seconds ISP compared to ~4.5 km/s (450 s ISP) exhaust velocity for the best chemical rockets of today)."

You certainly wouldn't want to use this to take off from Earth. But we could use it for deep space travel.

discuss

order

AtlasBarfed|3 years ago

Practically all the nuclear propulsion designs are ideally launched from space. You want to get the "fallout" as far from the Allen Belts as you can from what I remember reading of General Atomics's Project Orion.

Since nuclear rockets are far more practical for all major interplanetary travel, that's why a moon base or captured asteroid habitat will be the first real step to a "space civ".

Of course I'm nutso enough to think that SpaceX should launch antimatter collection arrays in orbit to grab it from the solar wind, right now.

Getting to Mars otherwise is really just a big marketing exercise.

It now kinda seems unrealistic that most sci fi interstellar empires have lots of planet based settlements (well, the ones that have to deal with gravity). Gravity wells are a huge PITA once a reasonably closed-loop space civ gets moving. A nice asteroid belt seems a lot more valuable or a planet with a crapton of low-gravity moons, than a planet with 1G gravity well you have to spend millions to escape.

On the moon, you could probably setup maglev launch or assisted launch with just solar panels.

Alas, our delicate earth-adapted physiology.

swagasaurus-rex|3 years ago

Well the bigger the gravity well, the more matter available to mine. Asteroids only make up a tiny fraction of the mass in our solar system.

JoeAltmaier|3 years ago

Use for heavy lifting? Depends on efficiency. If it 'burned' its fuel completely, then maybe not as dirty as imagined.

Further the oceans already contain dissolved uranium salts. Returning them to the ocean is 'net neutral' in a sense. Especially if we harvested them from there to begin with!