cool, I heard about project Orion, they did some tests in the atmosphere with normal explosives and it worked. But the problems with the main idea was that the ship would need alot of radiation shielding and it would need some where inside that was shielded away from the crew bits to store the nukes.

Why not build a ship big enough to house a nuclear power plant and run the ship off that? Kinda what the navy does on the battleships with their nuclear reactors onboard ships.

Or since we are not leavin the solor system we could use solar panels to recharge a reactor of some sort.

There was something similar that's a lot more environmentally friendly (though this wouldn't be all that bad if it were just one or two flights a year) that was researched heavily during the run up to Apollo involves using nuclear fuel to super-heat a fluid for propulsion.

Imagine nuclear reactors; they use fuel rods to generate heat that turns water to steam that turns a turbine. These would have much more potent fuel rods and would run massive quantities of, say, water, through the engine. It gets vaporized instantly, and creates thrust similar to current rocket engines, with much better specific impulse.

Moon trips could be done round trip in two to three days, Mars trips could be done direct in as little as two to three *weeks* versus months or years for round trips. Some liquids would be better than water but fans always use water as its 'not bad' and infinite in supply.

Apollo was going to use it for the upper stage of the Saturn-V but had some slight engineering problems. By the time it was fixed for later projects, hippies were giving NASA huge, huge problems (several-thousand person protests at KSC for example) for just launching satellites with small amounts of nuclear fuel. Even though these engines would be safe, politically they were impossible..

Today with modern computers (versus whatever they used in the 50s & 60s -- abacus?) they'd be really simple to pull off, all the problems were basically fixed in the 60s before being put on ice.

See.. if I were made Imperial Emperor of the New American Empire, thats one of those things that'd be on the top of my list.. Hippies can protest all they want; I'd need the slave labor they'd provide on the Moon, Mars and in the Asteroid Belt...

There's a great wikipedia entry on it too, not making any of it up. They actually made these engines and test-fired them many, many times. Real stuff. It's not 100% accurate (nothing in wikipedia is), but it only misses some minor things that a friend of mine nitpicked (he's a nuclear engineer of some kind at nuclear power plants, has a sample of yellowcake on his desk, he knows of what he speaks), so it's a solid read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

It wouldn't shock me if some day a country that didn't give a crap about protestors (like Russia or China) used this technology.. they'd really leave the rest of the world behind, capability-wise.

Edit: One of those NTR designs on that wiki page doesn't mention it, but all of those could very easily do a one-way Alpha Centauri trip in about 120 years. Not exactly warp 9, but.. better than the 'never' current tech could handle.

About explosions to propel the ship. Has no one ever thought of finding the worst farters in the world feed them beans and get them sitting on a fart hole and have these fart holes link up to the back of the ship and have a flame thrower to light the farts to give propulsion.

Since i thought of it and all, i will call this the FPU Fart Propulsion Unit.

Ahh now this will be fun. I spent 5 years working Nuclear power plants.

I got cooked internally.. So I know of what I speak also! lol

Anyone ever seen a fuel rod other then me? They range from 5 feet to 9 feet long, about 6 inches diameter filled with tiny half inch long pellets stacked end to end..

Superheat water? Well that is mild to describe it. There is Serious powere there for sure.

Now problem... You want to use water or something close as it would not hurt the planet.. thats cool..... What are you going to use to cool the rods themselves once the trip is done? I mean You CAN pump tons of Boron to control the reaction but that does not cool the rods down once they are heated. In a small plant that I worked at (still ran by the atomic energy commission) , it took them 3 days to get the rods cool enough to transport to the spent fuel pit. even then those puppies glowed for months afterwards.

So should a micro pin hole leak occur, big trouble for sure..

Now waht about after the rods are spent? what do you do with them? Where do you dump them? Not back on Earth hopefully.. but then how does one eject them from the craft?

Nuke plants only sue 10% of the whole rod... Why? dunno... but it has nothing to do with the rod gettng too hot raidoactive wise thats for sure.


Another thing.. Stopping.. how they gonna stop that puppy once it gets really moving??

I'm all for the idea.. but I would want some things tested before I strapped by butt into a seat .! lol

To stop all you do is use thrusters that fire from front to slow you down. This is what most sci fi movies show and yeah i know its not exactly real but some try to be realistic science.

Other than cutting engines and using thrusters to do a 180 then fire main engine up and pushing to slow you down by going the other way is all i can think of to slow you down the other way.

you know if all that doesn't work, there's surely a handy asteroid nearby doin the job for you ..

The problem of shielding the crew and heat buildup on the Orion turned out not to be the show stopping issues. The blast was in contacted with blast plate for so short a time that it could not transfer more heat than it did just impulse. The "engine" would only run for five minutes to orbit and five more to set up for transit to mars. The crew would have moved into a sheltered room for the acceleration radiation phase. Acceleration would have been less than the current space shuttle missions but of longer duration. The issue was you were dropping two nuclear booms per second and dumping large amount of radioactive debris into the atmosphere. This was global warming with a glow. If you use chemical rockets to put the ship in orbit first you lose the cost advantage of the ship.

There was a different sort of nuclear engine developed for long persistent but smaller thrust to be used on mars missions back in the 60s. It was test fired in the Nevada desert with much less radioactive output. My father worked on that project. This engine was scraped when the US signed a no nuclear devices in space deal with the USSR back in the late 60s. The lab where this work was done was turned into an electronics warfare test site. My brother has worked at the same test site developing some secret widgets for Iraq. That is another story.

I can not help you on the engineering problems as it is not my field. My father work for the then Space Nuclear Propulsion Laboratory, a division of NASA, in beautiful Jackass Flats Nevada. The desert is still there but SNPL is long gone. My field is medical so I am out of the loop on the issues with the engine. My brother is in electronics and not nuclear engines. He has developed a number of secret electronic warfare widgets for the military including some being used in Iraq. We remember visiting the lab back when they were working on the engines but that is all gone now. They do secret electric widgets there now.

I remember an open house at the lab when I was in grade school. We drove out from Las Vegas and saw the cold and hot labs. They had this air plane hanger sized building with multilayer leaded glass windows and robotic arms on the inside to play with the hot stuff. They showed us a film of one of the engine test firings. It had the exhaust cone pointed in the air and looked and sounded not unlike a rocket engine when firing. They even had an old Sherman tank turned into a rolling bomb shelter with robotic arms on it. They could drive out to the engine to work on it when it was hot. That was long long ago in a desert far far away.


Regarding the space tiolet: Back then the pre shuttle astronauts got into the space underwear and that was it until you got out of the capsule. There were no space toilets. The reason they had to finish the moon mission in 14 days was that was all the poop that one pair of space underwear could hold. The navy frog men that jumped in the water and open the capsules often turned green and throw-up in the ocean on smelling the inside of the capsule.