Ping!...................
Send a robot to plant the American flag. It won’t mind waiting around a year or two.
EXACTLY what’s needed, and by that I mean a more continuous propulsion system. Three year trip time is way too much and shouldn’t be necessary.
Why does it feel like we’re already on Mars...
“3000 K [2,727°C, or 4,940°F]”
What about Rankine? I only work with R.
Just think, of we hadn’t pissed away those billions on Ukraine and the *Trillions* in SWA, we could have spent that to have a working Mars spaceship by now.
Where does it say that an astronaut has to be a human being? Nothing against Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard, but we probably could design and train an extraterrestrial space robot to plant the Stars & Stripes on Mars and then hit a bucket of golf balls toward it.
NASA will take forever and cost the taxpayer 100s of billions and Musk can’t get his hands on this fuel, D’oh
“Traditional chemical propulsion is limited too much by its own mass.”
“NTP systems work by pumping a liquid propellant, most likely hydrogen, through a reactor core,” the US Office of Nuclear Energy explains. “Uranium atoms split apart inside the core and release heat through fission. This physical process heats up the propellant and converts it to a gas, which is expanded through a nozzle to produce thrust.”
it really does not take much heat to convert Hydrogen from a liquid to a gas, not sure why you need a nuclear reaction.
and you have the same reaction mass problem that they claim to have solved.
I like the idea of setting off a nuke a few miles behind the ship and letting the shockwave propel it to Mars.
1979, created a fusion powered rocket engine design. Fuel is an “ice cycle” that is cut, and then lasers work on that bit of fuel, to create the reaction.
The reaction force is exhausted to space.
So, the ship has both:
- traditional fuel powered rocket engines / thrusters
- fusion powered rocket engine for cruise and long distance
We need to get to the moon first! (Without a studio)
Nuclear? Hell, why not just send the crew with a bunch of takeout from Taco Bell, and...