Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://www.projectorion.com Orion is one of the great "what if's" of the twentieth century. Today, nuclear powered spaceships seem like little more than laughably naive 1950's science fiction, but it might have been otherwise...and still could be. Orion was the code name of a project aimed at discovering the feasibility of spaceships driven by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for manned missions to Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970. After seven years of work, the project's technical challenges seemed surmountable, but political obstacles brought the effort to a halt. Perhaps it's time to revisit the past and revive the space age?
Eventually, when large scale nuclear fusion and antimatter production gets economicaly and technologically feasibly whe will see heavyweight likes of ORION and ICAN-II etc. In the meantime the nearby future looks lightweight, with ionengines and tethers, but relatively slow, more suited for nearby space missions, a noticable exception, wich I think a very promising technology for Jovian missions and beyond is the mini-magnetosphere (M2P2) propulsion, recently suggestions have been made to include dust particles into the plasma as not only aquire impulse from the solar wind particles, but also from the solar light photons. The addition of remote particle beams to act as artificial solar wind would even more improve the thrust to weight ratio or serve as deccellerator if the beamer is postioned near Mars for example. Particle beams seem somewhat more efficient than current lasers delivering energy long distance, also particle beams can deliver proppelant. What I was thinking of , an ion engine, without the propellent and without the electricyty generator, I picture two seperate particle streams beamed remotely towards the engine: posive ions and an electronbeam. The electrons are used to induce a high voltagepotential in part of the engine wich is used to accelerate the incoming beamed ions even further.
Google up some stuff about Project Prometheus. It's a NASA initiative to implement nuclear energy for electricity and propulsion for interplanetary travel. Using a nuclear reactor to produce electrical power, as well as a reactor to produce thrust (basically a generational improvement over the NERVA) will obviate the Venus slingshot maneuver, and allow Earth-Mars transits in about three months, instead of the usual nine. Pretty cool stuff. Let's hope it's not just political rhetoric.
Chemical rockets typically have specific impulses around 250-400 seconds and a thrust/weight ratio of 100-200. Nuclear electric rockets can have a specific impulse of 20,000 seconds and a thrust to weight ratio of 0.0001. So, it is likely that the future will bring some nuclear engines. While nuclear might ultimately might be the most efficient, A niche market will emerge for really affordable lightweight crafts that receive beamed power, as the initial investment for a nuclear ship is really high and it probably has to be built in orbit (unless you want to launch a dirty Orion from Baghdag airport)
New space program kicks Prometheus into high gear? http://space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_040209.html
Stokes: the Orion drive was actually supposed to push a spaceship along by means of a sequential series of nuclear explosions, whereas Prometheus is planned to use ion drives (if I recall correctly) powered by electricity from a nuclear reactor. I read about "the Orion Maneuver" in The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran... I kinda thought it was a joke.
This idea from Freeman Dyson is theoretically possible, but practically impossible. The pusher plate is a huge disk of copper. How do you get a 10,000 ton plate of copper into orbit? He gets an A+ for creative thinking, but there are very good reasons NASA rejected this idea.
Btw: if you explode an EMP bomb, could you direct the pulse towards a magnetic field pusher plate?, ?? this way you could trade a heavy pusher plate and a-bombs for lightweight vessel using conventional explosives?? BTW: Orion is sheer brute force, the actual use of the heavy a-bomb explosions might be effective but the effiency is poor. The bombs have to be exploded behind the pusher plate. In space a atomic explosion has the shape of an expanding globe, even with a really large pusher plate diametre, you catch only 1/8 of the total wavefront, maybe less! other particles fly everywhere except to the pusherplate... ? what would be helpfull to build is atomic bombs that create asymmetric explosions , maybe to play with variable neutron deflector thickness etc?
You're right, they are hardly similar. I was adding it for relevance to current events. As far as "shaping" nuclear explosions goes, that depends entierly on what's encapsulating the reaction. For example, in the case of a pellet/laser system, whatever is enclosing the deuterium has a very high change of undergoing neutron activation. However, if you were doing some sort of fantastic magnetic bottle/nozzle system, then the engine bell and after parts of the ship would slowly become activated. Unless you're doing the (suspected) blue supergiant photonic reaction (which would suck for this application), those neutrons are going somewhere and that somewhere is going to become activated "fallout." Granted there won't be very much, but there will be some. However, we can all agree that given these energies, it generally won't be lasting.
As I understand it, the nuclear charge was not really meant to push the thing through space directly, the metal plate absorbs the tremendous heat and then radiates it, protecting the ship from being vaporized and propelling the craft forward. Anyone read the book "The Starship and the Canoe", by Kenneth Brower (1978)? It's about Freeman Dyson and his son.
...maybe, if a nuclear shaped charge is possible, they might use it to make more effective bunker busters with less fallout on the surface?
I took a look at the URL concerning Prometheus and I see another Mars rover is planned for 2009, this time with a nuclear battery fueled by Plutonium. I don't know the particulars but my opinion so far in lieu of my limited knowledge, is that nuclear propulsion systems, whether Prometheus or Orion and even these nuclear batteries are best not built on or launched from Earth. Launch associated accidents have and probably will occur again and it would be rather crass of us to allow that stuff to rain back into the biosphere indiscriminantly. JIMO sounds quite interesting but I suggest we maybe look at solar sails a bit more fervently. They might not be altogether quite quick, but as far as I know, should get the job done. All of this stuff would fare much better if we could get some major factory industries happening at the Lagrange points. Maybe the interstellar vehicles we might hope to launch some day will be ion/explosion/Brussard Ram hybrid ships but for intrasolar exploration, I think we really should see just how far we can push solar sails into our service. "they might use it to make more effective bunker busters " Hey, Vortexx, I think you are glimpsing something there. Seems they want to employ some top military brass to help develop Prometheus. Since the largest portion of the space technology we have developed so far has been done with military ends in sight, this might be one of the main reasons why they want to pursue this, they can fund more military and defense/offense research under the guise of space exploration. Ah, the pork barrel is still half empty.
Vortexx Thank you for making me laugh. People were saying the same thing 50 years ago. You are talking about pipedreams. Not everyone has your unlimited patience. Orion is the only "real" technology we can actually use. Forget Prometheus. I'm talking about Orion. Serious lift off capability. BigBlueHead So did the administration. Thats one reason it was cancelled. The dumbasses couldn't understand it. Spidergoat. Wrong. Its feasibility is beyond argument. Wrong. Steel or possibly aluminum. 1000 tons. The vehicle is 4000 tons. It expends 50 tons in fuel reaching orbit. There were many reasons. All bad. Vortexx Who cares. Still outperforms chemical to a ridiculous margin. Almost the entire vehicle mass reaches space. Nope. They were in fact designing shaped charges. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Orion is not planned by Nasa. They are too dumb to realise that fallout can be reduced to acceptable levels. http://www.projectorion.com
Speaking about lowtec highpower, How about using a really large HYPACC or multiple hypaccs as launch assist ? Perhaps it could hurl even a heavy Orion vehicle the first 10 - 15 kilometres up the atmosphere, after wich the first nuclear ignition takes place at a height that the air is already a lot lot thinner, even less fallout, I think the hypaccs could be build for allmost the cost of the amount of nukes you are saving by not having a ground launch (and a steel/graphite launch tube) and could be reused for new launches wich really large costsavings occur. Let's see, a Hypacc with 1 metre diameter barrel is calculated to launch a 10 ton object 50 km or 100 ton object 5 km, so let's assume we have one of the smaller orion vehicles, a 4000 ton Mark-II with a 40 metre diameter pusher plate. 1 metre diameter hypacc barrel, surface area = 0,785398163 m2 40 metre diameter hypacc barrel surface area = 1256,637061 m2 = 1600 times the surfacearea of a 1 metre barrel, so: 1600 * 10 metric tons = 16000 metric ton up to 50 km or 1600 * 100 metric tons = 160.000 metric ton up to 5 km! Even if Hypacc lifting power doesn't scale linear with barrel size, I would think that you could give an object of 50.000 ton a nice headstart let alone a "small" object of just 4000 tons Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! that would allmost be hurled into LEO, but the accelration would be too fast for the crew, so we actually have to scale down the HYPACC, by cutting the barrel length in halve (less waterpressure) , this would save some money on the hypacc construction also. Naturally we could also increase the barrel size diameter of the hypacc to accomodate even larger orion designs with 10.000 tons pusher plates etc, so that you can launch an instant moonbase complete with orerefinery and powerplant and spare room for the jacuzzi. i don"t know about the radioactivity of the pusherplate metal but maybe once it stops glowing in the dark you could use this 10.000 ton steel to help build a dome skeleton, capping one the mooncraters or something..
Lets let it rest, it really isn't a very wise idea at all. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It just occured to me that an orion vehicle would be capable of creating an instant space elevator, it could transport the thousands of kilometres tether length in a single stage, while the sheer weight of the orion and its pusherplate is the perfect heavy counterweight you need to get away with shorter cablelength and pretty large object climb the cable.... Nasa estimates the classic proposed space elevator with 100.000 kilometres cable length could in seperate runs lift total 50 tons day, now the orion elevator would have a cablelength of "only" 32000 kilometres (GTO) and lift maybe more than 500 tons a day. altitude could slowly but steadily restored by using a nuclear ion engine like in prometheus. Shorter cable lengths (like 800 kilometres) are possible if you use the concept of a rotovator. For endevours such as these I would think that these few upper atmosphere atomic explosions for the initial launch generate much less strain on the environment and humans than having to launch 500 tons of payload a day using chemical propellant, especially if you do this on a daily basis for 5 years...
because, it might after all not be impossible, impractible and stupid? (and I am aware of the Wayne Smith controversy on the net Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! but the idea of the Orion is appealing, but so is MITEE-B) I am not suggesting you want to have weekly launches of orion vehicles, blasting and radiating their way through the atmosphere, but I think that it could be a very important stepping stone, if you tranport instant self-sustaining moonbase or space-elevator with it, from that point you no longer need a somewhat dirty orion or chemical rockets to get heavy stuff up there, as you got a space-elevator that could be powered by the greenest of energies and a moonbase that doesn't need supplies to be flown in every 3 months, but instead could extract it's needs from moonsoil and start building new spaceships overthere. So, in the longer run, the dirty Orion, when properly used might be the greenest enviroment friendly solution for expansion in space of them all? Maybe the North Koreans will pick up the subject once their nukes get passed the bluffing stage, Little Kim seems just the guy to want to show the world launching an oversized phallic object in space using nuclear explosions Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
