Posted on 10/29/2009 3:10:03 PM PDT by kronos77
MOSCOW – A nuclear-powered spaceship that can carry passengers to Mars and beyond may sound like science fiction.
But Russian engineers say they have a breakthrough design for such a craft, which could leapfrog them way ahead in the international race to build a manned spacecraft that can cover vast interplanetary distances.
They claim they’ll be ready to build one as early as 2012.
In a meeting with top Russian space scientists Wednesday, President Dmitry Medvedev gave the nuke-powered space craft a green light and pledged to come up with the cash to cover its $600-million price tag.
“It’s a very serious project, and we need to find the money,” Mr. Medvedev told the scientists.
Small nuclear reactors and atomic batteries have long been used to power unmanned spy satellites, and both NASA and the former Soviet space program spent huge sums trying to design a safe system that could propel a spacecraft once it left the Earth’s atmosphere (see Project Orion and Project Prometheus), analogous to the way nuclear-powered submarines operate.
Most manned spacecraft are propelled by chemical rockets, and supplement their energy needs with solar panels. But experts say existing rocket technology would be impractical for long-distance flights, even for a voyage to our nearest planetary neighbor, Mars.
“The energy requirements for a three-year flight is very great, and that calls for a technology that can deliver a lot of power,” says Andrei Ionin, an independent Moscow-based space expert.
“The former USSR had a lot of accumulated experience in this field,” lofting scores of nuclear-spy satellites over three decades, he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at features.csmonitor.com ...
“Makes one wonder if some bureaucrat signed a treaty with some green skinned alien to NOT develop spaceflight....”
Or Apollo found/photographed artificial items on the moon, and scared the hell out of everyone concerned, including the Russians who took sledge hammers to their moon stuff.
The moon has some really odd and unexplained characteristics - in rings like a ceramic bell when meteors hit, for one. Not to mention the deliberately miscatalogued or omitted Apollo images in NASA’s catalogue...
The list of stuff continues...
The bottom line is that the Russians won’t be leaving low Earth orbit any time soon even if they do figure out how to get a small nuclear reactor into orbit. All that means is that you need fewer solar panels on your “spacecraft”.”
Roddenberry was a TV producer and writer, so counting his opinion as worth something vis a vie the real Russian space program is ludicrous.
Back in those days Russia was poor, but now they are one of the leading oil exporters and are arguably far wealthier, and so can put a lot more resources toward new propulsion systems... their school system still churns out lots of engineers and mathematicians unlike the US.
I wouldn’t ride to the next county in anything made in Russia.
They're going to make a steam powered spaceship?
OK, let's see. The US is suppose to have a one trillion a year budget a year for the next ten years. But we all know that you have to at least double the amount that the Gubment budgets. (Remember cash for clunkers started out with one billion, but became a three billion dollar rathole.)
So we have a 20 trillion budget for the next ten years. Although I believe the 600 million figure to be inaccurate 600 million to 20 trillion would be as 1 dollar is to 33,333 dollars. If we could do it for 600 million, that would be pocket change.
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