Posted on 03/11/2016 8:12:05 AM PST by BenLurkin
Last week, their national nuclear corporation Rosatom announced it isbuilding a nuclear engine that will reach Mars in a month and a half—with fuel to burn for the trip home. Russia might not achieve its goal of launching a prototype by 2025. But that has more to do with the country’s financial situation...than the technical challenges of a nuclear engine.
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“A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated,” says Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, CA. “The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things.”
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But the outcomes of those two methods are radically different, because chemical rocketry has a catch-22. The faster or farther you want to go, the more fuel you need to pack. The more fuel you pack, the heavier your rocket. And the heavier your rocket, the more fuel you need to bring…
Eventually, the equation balancing thrust to weight plateaus, which is why a year and a half is around the lower time limit for sending a chemically propelled, crewed mission to Mars.... And that’s not even considering the incredible cost of launching fuel—about $3,000 a pound...
The engines the Soviets and Americans were developing during the Space Race, on the other hand, had at least double a chemical rocket’s specific impulse. Modern versions could likely do even better. Which means spaceships would be able to carry a lot more fuel, and therefore fire their thrusters for a longer portion of the trip to Mars (bonus: artificial gravity!). Even better, a thermal fission spaceship would have enough fuel to decelerate, go into Martian orbit, and even return to Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at defence.pk ...
Absolutely. Project Orion from Freeman Dysons project Orion is the ONLY WAY for long range human space travel(under current technology. America is too chicken to suggest nuke space flight. Thank goodness the Russians aren’t.
Lol!
Or maybe Project Daedalus-like?
In development they made nukes the size of a softball....not to mention the Davy Crockett, which was much bigger.
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