NASA Proposal to Revive Nuclear Thermal Space Propulsion Development

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/08/nasa-proposal-to-revive-nuclear-thermal.html

by Anon84 • 14 years ago

93 39 14 years ago

wazoox• 14 years ago

It's not clear that this proposal is actually coming from NASA. That would be great news nonetheless.

pjscott• 14 years ago

The part of this that surprised me is that the amount of radioactive fission products in the reactor is fairly insignificant for the first part of a mission -- a nuclear thermal rocket can be well out of Earth's orbit before it's as radioactive as the RTG that powers the Curiosity rover.

Wingman4l79• 14 years ago

Good luck explaining that to people.

jlgreco3• 14 years ago

Honestly the best way to handle that would probably be to simply not mention it.

If directly asked about it, just start spewing jargon at them until they get bored and walk away. Just don't give them something that would make a good soundbite.

DeepDuh4• 14 years ago

Can someone ELI5 how that works?

johngalt• 14 years ago

The fuel that goes into the reactor isn't that dangerous, but the spent fuel is very dangerous.

InclinedPlane4• 14 years ago

Uranium or Plutonium isn't that dangerous, it's fission byproducts that are super dangerous, and they only build up over time.

InclinedPlane4• 14 years ago

One of the best ways to take advantage of an NTR is to use it as an upper stage where it will only ever operate outside of the atmosphere.

nextbigfuture2• 14 years ago

The presentation was made at the NASA Future on space operations workshops

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

I'll start considering links to nextbigfuture as blogspam unless they contain links to the presentations (and referring material) from NASA servers.

edit: Sorry. I mistook the first link for a cluster of tags.

I'd like to offer help making the layout clearer. I made a couple observations on the Disqus discussion on the page.

nextbigfuture2• 14 years ago

The first link is to the 24 page presentation from the NASA FISO (future in space operations archive). What is your problem ?

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

I'm very sorry. I mistook the first link for a cluster of tags.

Can I help you with the site layout? We could make it much clearer. I think I just proved it's not idiot proof. :-(

uvdiv• 14 years ago

It's the first line of the post.

http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Borowski_6-27-12/B...

Wingman4l79• 14 years ago

The 1950s/60s NERVA program that the blog post mentions in passing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

Project Rover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover

For hard scifi buffs, check out Stephen Baxter's space-program-alt-hist novel Voyage, where (among other things) NERVA is revived for a manned Mars shot.

I'm kinda surprised to see this; I thought that public acceptance of nuclear-related programs would be at a low, after Fukushima. Heck, I remember when people were kicking up a fuss over Cassini's RTG back in 1997.

Are we going to revive Project Orion next? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...

DeepDuh4• 14 years ago

All I ever heard before was Project Orion, but after reading about Project Rover, I don't understand why you would want Orion's design. Isn't Rover superior in every way? It appears to me that Orion uses a much smaller fraction of the released nuclear energy, leading to a bigger waste of resources and smaller payload to total weight ratio. Furthermore it's harder to use Rover as a weapon, but maybe this would be a minus for some of the potential investors.

Wingman4l79• 14 years ago

Well, Project Orion was certainly more dramatic -- detonating hundreds of nukes to punch a rocket up into space. It was also top-secret at the time; that explains its mystique.

As far as being a superior choice, I don't think it's quite apples to apples. Project Orion (nuclear pulse propulsion) was designed to get very large payloads directly into orbit. Nuclear thermal rockets like NERVA were apparently designed to be used as drop-in replacements for upper stages on conventional chemical rockets, or as space "tugs" in orbit. That might imply that it was difficult to design a nuclear thermal rocket which would deliver the high initial thrust(?) necessary to lift a payload directly out of our gravity well (but IANA rocket scientist, so I may be mistaken on this). That said, a small blurb on Wikipedia does mention that "Robert Bussard proposed the Single-Stage-To-Orbit "Aspen" vehicle using a nuclear thermal rocket for propulsion and liquid hydrogen propellant[...]" -- so maybe it would indeed have been a superior design choice in the end.

comicjk2• 14 years ago

Orion-type designs are less efficient than nuclear thermal, but have orders of magnitude more energy to work with. Nuclear bombs are pretty unbeatable for raw power.

There is a safer and cheaper way to harness nuclear bombs for heavy lifting, though, as long as you don't mind a very bumpy ride for the cargo: the Verne Gun (http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/150-kiloton-nuclear-verne-g...).

InclinedPlane4• 14 years ago

They aren't really comparable, you'd use each for different purposes. An NTR is an incremental design, you can use it in a more or less conventional rocket design, with massive improvements in payload and/or delta V capability.

Nuclear pulse propulsion is something different entirely. It has vastly higher exhaust velocity and vastly more thrust but has very different design requirements than NTRs. With it you could put enormous payloads into orbit (think battleships and aircraft carriers) if you were ok with the fallout, or you could intercept dangerous asteroids or comets with very short warning times, or you could launch payloads to neighboring stars at truly enormous speeds.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

>Project Orion

There is an excellent 2003 BBC documentary on Orion, "To Mars by A-Bomb" watchable here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4k_YZAXSEI

It features Arthur C Clarke, George and Freeman Dyson, and a number of other luminaries.

Wingman4l79• 14 years ago

Definitely worth watching -- it has rare footage of test launches with models and interviews with guys who actually worked on the project.

misterfusion3• 14 years ago

Nuclear propulsion will open vast horizons to the future of mankind. I think the best option will be fusion-powered plasma turbines. http://youtu.be/ro5-QYqqxzM

rektide• 14 years ago

I was going to say it looks like a Bussard IEC (Inertial Electrostatic Containment) with a VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) tacked on the back, but there's a dozen things about the IEC that they're talking that seem different, and they spent little enough time detailing the thruster that comparisons v.s. VASIMR are a little tricky.

Lol, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASIMR

misterfusion3• 14 years ago

There are a lot of key differences. Bussard IEC can be characterized by recirculation of electrons, virtual cathode, "wiffleball" magnetic compression. VASIMR can be characterized by helicon antenna, single phase instead of multiphase.

misterfusion3• 14 years ago

Almost all fusion approaches have some similarities between them. For example, Polywell looks like the "Magnetic Well for Plasma Confinement". http://www.google.com/patents/US4007392?printsec=drawing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell Multicusp plasma containment was already previously widely used. http://www.google.com/patents?id=A9wyAAAAEBAJ

comicjk2• 14 years ago

Very smart to link nuclear thermal technology to manned Mars missions. It would be wonderful if public enthusiasm after Curiosity makes further development in this area possible.

I want my spaceship!

NASA Proposal to Revive Nuclear Thermal Space Propulsion Development

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