Re: The Cold Equations

If you use a reactor to provide you with the needed mass flow of
polonium you have an inefficient variation of a nuclear reactor powered
rocket. Consider the power of the reactor needed to provide the
Polonium you need to power your rocket. Divide the power of the rocket
by the power of the reactor and you'll see you'll never do better than
about 1 watt of rocket power per watt of reactor power. Since both
cost a lot in terms of mass, your thrust to weight ratio is very tiny.
So, you system is inefficient.

If you want to read about small rockets, you might want to check out a
thread I started back in the summer of 2001. SODA CAN SSTO. You can
also check out MEMS ROCKETS on the web.

Using MEMS technology we can make very tiny rockets. Imagine a ***
of tungsten chemically etched with millions of tiny holes. These holes
are precisely shaped - into delaval type rocket nozzles. The nozzles
are precisely fed rocket fuel one drop at a time by ink jet print
cartridge type technology Instead of four inks of different colors, we
have two oxidizer fuel combos. One hypergolic. The other high
specific impulse. The hypergolic is used as a sparkplug. We have
propellant cartridges packed solid behind the delivery nozzles, facing
a paper thin tungsten screen with precisely shaped holes. This entire
system, several inches thick, can be shaped into any shape to create
what is known as a PROPULSIVE SKIN. The same technology that delivers
HDTV pictures by precisely controlling millions of pixels across a
plasma screen, can be adapted to deliver precise thrust vectors across
this propulsive skin - and make tiny, lightweight vehicles of immense
capacity.

Imagine a 10 foot tall cone tapering so that it is 3 feet across at its
base. It weighs about 2,000 pounds, and consists mostly of
LOX/Kerosine. It can put 40 pounds into LEO, operating in two stages.
Or it can operate with three stages and place a 10 pound payload on the
surface of the moon - or into orbit around mars. This is perfectly
doable. There are about 200 pounds of RFNA and UDMH on board to spark
the LOX/kerosene engines. Each stage is 2' 6" tall, The top stage for
interplanetary flight is 2' 6" tall and 9" across at the base and
carries 10 pounds. The LEO payload is 5' tall and 18" across at the
base and carries 40 pounds.

A small nuclear pulse rocket is possible using MEMS technology. The
same technology that is used to compress fusion pellets can be used to
compress plutonium pellets. As you increase peak density relative to
resting density, you can decrease critical mass by the square of the
ratio of the two. So, if conventional C4 compression can detonate 2 kg
of Pu to produce 8.8 TJ of energy, when compressing it to a peak
density 3x greater than resting density - electromagnetic compression
of a 20 gram (1 oz) Pu wire can produce 88 GJ of energy when compressed
to 30x peak density. If advanced techniques could compress the Pu to
300x peak density - the Pu wire would be reduced to 200 milligrams -
and the entire device would be smaller than a 45 caliber round -
massing around 15 grams. These would be organized into a dozen clips
of 176 each and precisely fired with onboard MEMS rockets to a region
within the parabolic pusher plate to produce efficient thrust at high
exhaust speed and thrust for the vehicle.

A round like this when detonated behind a 3 foot diameter pusher plate
- parabolically shaped to redirect most of the blast in the preferred
direction - and allowing another 15 grams of vaporized steel to be
added to the exhaust stream would produce a vehicle very similar in
size to the three stage vehicle described above, but this 2,000 pound
vehicle could push 600 pounds through a delta vee of 20 km/sec!!! A
single stage interplanetary cruiser! Using 2,112 rounds to achieve
maximal speed. This is sufficient to go to Mars in a few weeks, land
there, and return a few weeks later.

Using the fission reaction as a spark to a fusion reaction would allow
the vehicle to be multiplied in size by about 10,000 times without
increasing the amount of Pu used (200 grams per launch) - This would
result in a vehicle that lifted 6,000,000 pounds across the solar
system while massing 20 million pounds! But the core technology would
remain largely unchanged - but a 6,000,000 pound payload is enough to
place a small city on Mars or the Moon -and supply it and expand it!

Why don't we have this technology broadly available today?

Well, consider the weapons potential of this technology.

A single stage chemical rocket of the type described, equipped with a
40 pound payload, enough to house 5 clips, with nearly a thousand
nuclear weapons - with a 2 ton TNT equivalent yeild - could deliver
these precisely MIRV fashion across a large region from any point on
Earth. A handful of these weapons could overwhelm any nation or group
of nations on Earth. A 2 ton TNT yeild is equivalent to a block buster
of WWII. Imagine delivering 1,000 of these precisely using GPS
simultaneously anywhere on Earth. Buildings and installations would be
vaporized across large regions very precisely. Multiply the yeilds
of the tiny rounds 10,000 fold and you could wipe out entire nations in
an afternoon with a handful of vehicles adapted to weapons systems.

This is why the fantasy of space travel must remain a fantasy for now.
Its not technology that's the problem. Its us.

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