'Star Trek' fusion impulse engine in the works (Travel to Mars in 6 Weeks)

Cnet ^ | 10/2.2012 | Cnet

[JRandomFreeper]

You are very negative.

The facts don't support you on an aging population. Lots of new folks here are having babies.

Population is growning.

We have more with less work because we are wasting less, and are becoming more efficient.

If you still have children living in your home, you are WAY too young to be so negative.

We are progressing faster and faster than ever. The information that it took 200 years to put in the Library of Congress is now created in about 10 minutes.

'Sup to you. You can see the glass as half empty.

/johnny

[skinkinthegrass]

thanks, for the ping.

[Erasmus]

One sleepless night many years ago I speculated that out of an ideal fusion engine you could get something like 40 000 pounds of thrust per gram of fuel per second.

If this could be achieved, you could completely change the architecture of rockets going into Earth orbit, and far beyond.

Your basic vehicle to Earth orbit would be a platform with a number of fusion rockets on its underside. The platform would be a space frame with enough internal volume for the engines and for the basic operating crew and some passengers. It might be on the order of 50 feet in diameter. The payload (which could also be a passenger compartment) would ride on the top surface of the platform with a fairly simple and light dome fairing over it.

But how could such a large frontal area (50ft diameter) object reach orbital speeds without busting up in the atmosphere, you might ask.

Well, the nuclear fuel has a specific impulse many orders of magnitude beyond chemical rocket fuels. You could load up the platform to a gross weight of, say, a million pounds, most of which would be payload. 50 kilos of this nuclear fuel would be enough to power the entire loaded platform to high orbit, and back again.

You’d rise up in the atmosphere at perhaps 200 feet per second, no more. Even at this leisurely rate, you’d be above most of the atmosphere in 10 or 15 minutes, at which time you could boost the thrust to give you a modest 1.25 G or so, and complete your trip to orbit in a total flight time of about 45 minutes, powered all the way, miind you.

Coming back would NOT involve “re-entry” as we know it today. It would just be the exact reverse profile of the ascent; powered all the way.

All made possible, in theory of course, by nuclear rockets of the general kind I mentioned at the beginning.

And if you have a craft that can get into Earth orbit that easily, why stop there?