# Nasa Going Nuclear



## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 18, 2018)

source : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ck-cold-war-era-atomic-rockets-to-get-to-mars

If that type of engine becomes viable, it makes me wonder how far down the road is warp drive or FTL.  I'm sure artificial gravity is somewhere on a list to get developed too.


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## eidairaman1 (Feb 18, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> source : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ck-cold-war-era-atomic-rockets-to-get-to-mars
> 
> If that type of engine becomes viable, it makes me wonder how far down the road is warp drive or FTL.  I'm sure artificial gravity is somewhere on a list to get developed too.



Subs use nuclear power, so why not.

This is Fiction here: but look up Robotech: The Macross Saga or Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. I seriously doubt I will see Warp/Fold Drives in my lifetime, let alone flying cars if it's the Lord's will for me to live in this body 67 more years.

Here's a fun video
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1143094285825526&id=189776124490685


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## Space Lynx (Feb 18, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> source : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ck-cold-war-era-atomic-rockets-to-get-to-mars
> 
> If that type of engine becomes viable, it makes me wonder how far down the road is warp drive or FTL.  I'm sure artificial gravity is somewhere on a list to get developed too.



Won't it be an inflated government budget though no matter what NASA does, Elon Musk already has the best budget option... might take longer, but eventually we as a society are going to have to get our spending under control, downsize military, lower costs of healthcare to European levels, etc. I been asking myself how come no one in the world seems to care we haven't even paid for the two wars yet, its all on credit card still and no one seems to mind, no one is lowering our credit rating or being like yo your currency is worth nothing.

I guess I just don't understand how it works, oh well.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 18, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> ...warp drive or FTL.


That's crazy talk.  Hot hydrogen makes a more energetic explosion (thrust).  It's a demonstrable technology here on Earth.  The problem is making it  small, light, and safe enough for space use.



lynx29 said:


> Elon Musk already has the best budget option...


Musk doesn't have access to enriched uranium.  Falcon Heavy also has half the payload capacity Saturn V had (which was responsible for the moon missions).


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## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 18, 2018)

eidairaman1 said:


> Subs use nuclear power, so why not.



True but it would a bit different, water vs space.



FordGT90Concept said:


> That's crazy talk.



Science fiction even. That doesnt mean its not doable, _eventually_. 



FordGT90Concept said:


> Musk doesn't have access to enriched uranium



I do believe Musk has a government contract, even tho we dont know the terms, I would bet he could gain access to enriched uranium easily enough.


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## Mr.Scott (Feb 18, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> I would bet he could gain access to enriched uranium easily enough.



You can get anything you want if you have enough coin.


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## Vayra86 (Feb 18, 2018)

lynx29 said:


> Won't it be an inflated government budget though no matter what NASA does, Elon Musk already has the best budget option... might take longer, but eventually we as a society are going to have to get our spending under control, downsize military, lower costs of healthcare to European levels, etc. I been asking myself how come no one in the world seems to care we haven't even paid for the two wars yet, its all on credit card still and no one seems to mind, no one is lowering our credit rating or being like yo your currency is worth nothing.
> 
> I guess I just don't understand how it works, oh well.



How it works? Its called living on debt, and the US is addicted to it, and getting off the addiction will be a painful exercise, if not impossible. The bottom line is that no one is willing to take a loss / reduction of wealth for granted.


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## Mr.Scott (Feb 18, 2018)

Vayra86 said:


> How it works? Its called living on debt, and the US is addicted to it, and getting off the addiction will be a painful exercise, if not impossible. The bottom line is that no one is willing to take a loss / reduction of wealth for granted.


It is possible, but at the cost of world isolation.


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## Space Lynx (Feb 18, 2018)

Mr.Scott said:


> It is possible, but at the cost of world isolation.



Or after China, India, and the East becomes wealthy enough to finally call us out and say our money is worth nothing. Technically since it is not tied to anything like gold, our money is only as worth as much as the rest of the world sees it to be, and if we just write ourselves blank checks of trillions of dollars and print fake money year after year, eventually other countries might as well start doing the same thing if there are no consequences to never paying back your debt. I still don't understand how the two wars are not paid for, yet we can increase military spending by 70 billion this year.


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## Mr.Scott (Feb 18, 2018)

The two wars are not paid for because the US consistently pays to rebuild other countries afterwards. That bleeding has to stop.
The increase this year is for the foreseeable near future.
There will be a few things that will need to be taken care of.


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## Norton (Feb 18, 2018)

lynx29 said:


> snip.





Mr.Scott said:


> snip


*Nasa Going Nuclear  *is the thread title (nuclear rockets- news, theory, history, etc..) - please keep on topic


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## RejZoR (Feb 18, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> source : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ck-cold-war-era-atomic-rockets-to-get-to-mars
> 
> If that type of engine becomes viable, it makes me wonder how far down the road is warp drive or FTL.  I'm sure artificial gravity is somewhere on a list to get developed too.



Artificial gravity already exists. It's called (spin) centrifugal force. It's how you create gravity in zero G environment.


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## R-T-B (Feb 18, 2018)

RejZoR said:


> Artificial gravity already exists. It's called (spin) centrifugal force. It's how you create gravity in zero G environment.



It's also horribly hard to scale, making it near useless in practice.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 18, 2018)

RejZoR said:


> Artificial gravity already exists. It's called (spin) centrifugal force. It's how you create gravity in zero G environment.


Actually that's a bit of fiction too because when the craft starts spinning and you're not touching anything, it will spin without you.  Kind of like how when ISS fires its rockets to maintain orbit, astronauts and everything in it that isn't tied down heads towards the engines.  Gravity creates a relationship between relative objects that doesn't exist in zero-gravity.

To overcome the issues, it has to be very big.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 20, 2018)

Forgive me, but I picture artificial gravity as having being able to walk throughout a ship not float, not spin in a small area. I know the current state of Artificial gravity might be considered pre-alpha, plus its still too weak for space.


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## Divide Overflow (Feb 20, 2018)

NASA isn't "going nuclear".  It's been nuclear for quite some time.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 21, 2018)

Divide Overflow said:


> NASA isn't "going nuclear".  It's been nuclear for quite some time.


thats kinda true but if you read the article....


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## Divide Overflow (Feb 22, 2018)

DeathtoGnomes said:


> thats kinda true but if you read the article....


I understand.  You're referring to a nuclear propulsion system rather than a nuclear power system.  But even this isn't new concept:


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## R-T-B (Feb 22, 2018)

Divide Overflow said:


> I understand.  You're referring to a nuclear propulsion system rather than a nuclear power system.  But even this isn't new concept:



Concept vs actually happening are different things.


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## silkstone (Feb 22, 2018)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Actually that's a bit of fiction too because when the craft starts spinning and you're not touching anything, it will spin without you.  Kind of like how when ISS fires its rockets to maintain orbit, astronauts and everything in it that isn't tied down heads towards the engines.  Gravity creates a relationship between relative objects that doesn't exist in zero-gravity.
> 
> To overcome the issues, it has to be very big.



So long as you have a method of getting up to the same speed as the rotating section of a craft, it wouldn't be a problem. You'd still  experience ''artificial gravity'. A little like if you throw something inside a moving car, that object would till move relative to the inside of the car, rather than the outside.
The real problems that would come from spinning up a smaller craft would be that your head and feet would experience different amounts of force, and the Coriolis effect would make you pretty sick.

It wouldn't have to be 'that' big to work, but certainly bigger than anything we've ever put into space so far. Numbers-wise, if you were to spin something, with a radius of 100 m, up to 2 rpm, you'd get close to 0.5 g of force with few adverse effects. It would take about 10x the amount of material of the ISS to build something like this.

To actually live in space, on way to do it would be to capture an asteroid, mine sections of it out and then spin it up.


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## lexluthermiester (Feb 22, 2018)

NASA "going nuclear" could be good if done correctly. For example, if the reactors in question were made fail-safe. If used to generate power, which they've already done, it would need proper containment to prevent exposure to living organisms.  If used as propulsion, the waste from the thrust stream would need to be directed away for Earth of inhabited orbital stations and vehicles. All of these aspect are tricky at best, lethally dangerous at worst. The practicality of using nuclear materials in human space travel is debatable. Unmanned spacecraft that we'll likely never retrieve is one thing. Spacecraft where humans and other life will reside is completely another story.


RejZoR said:


> Artificial gravity already exists. It's called (spin) centrifugal force.


Centrifugal Force is not "artificial gravity". It can mimic the effect of gravity by harnessing rotational vector acceleration but is not, by definition, an artificial form of gravity. It is better to call it a directional force effect. A true form of "artificial gravity" would be to synthetically reproduce the actual force of gravity without the mass that normally generates it.


silkstone said:


> To actually live in space, on way to do it would be to capture an asteroid, mine sections of it out and then spin it up.


This assumes the asteroid in question is structurally sound enough to handle the forces of the spin, IE resists flying apart under the stress loads the spin would introduce to the outside layers of the asteroid. This would very improbable.


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## silkstone (Feb 22, 2018)

lexluthermiester said:


> NASA "going nuclear" could be good if done correctly. For example, if the reactors in question were made fail-safe. If used to generate power, which they've already done, it would need proper containment to prevent exposure to living organisms.  If used as propulsion, the waste from the thrust stream would need to be directed away for Earth of inhabited orbital stations and vehicles. All of these aspect are tricky at best, lethally dangerous at worst. The practicality of using nuclear materials in human space travel is debatable. Unmanned spacecraft that we'll likely never retrieve is one thing. Spacecraft where humans and other life will reside is completely another story.
> 
> Centrifugal Force is not "artificial gravity". It can mimic the effect of gravity by harnessing rotational vector acceleration but is not, by definition, an artificial form of gravity. It is better to call it a directional force effect. A true form of "artificial gravity" would be to synthetically reproduce the actual force of gravity without the mass that normally generates it.
> 
> This assumes the asteroid in question is structurally sound enough to handle the forces of the spin, IE resists flying apart under the stress loads the spin would introduce to the outside layers of the asteroid. This would very improbable.



It would only need to withstand 1 g, which is pretty low from an engineering perspective. The initial forces that were used to spin the object up would be what could break it apart. You'd have to do a geological survey of the thing first though, I guess. I'm not saying any of this would be easy, just that it's within the realms of possibility at our current level of technology.

You could either dig a tunnel-like system inside, or 'scoop out' a circular path on the surface to build a structure. Digging would be the better option though as it would provide inherent radiation shielding. 

I imagine that once asteroid mining becomes a thing, people will then look to creating asteroid 'bases'


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## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 23, 2018)

I imagine one problem with the asteroid theory is that it doesnt stop, for anything. The cost to even catch up to an asteroid on a large scale to "carve out" and then to build a base seems ridiculously high, not to mention the time it takes to ship materials. Then you have the path it orbits around the sun, it might be close enough to earth for a number of years. 

To top all of that, you would not have access to Amazons air delivery.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 23, 2018)

silkstone said:


> So long as you have a method of getting up to the same speed as the rotating section of a craft, it wouldn't be a problem. You'd still  experience ''artificial gravity'. A little like if you throw something inside a moving car, that object would till move relative to the inside of the car, rather than the outside.
> The real problems that would come from spinning up a smaller craft would be that your head and feet would experience different amounts of force, and the Coriolis effect would make you pretty sick.
> 
> It wouldn't have to be 'that' big to work, but certainly bigger than anything we've ever put into space so far. Numbers-wise, if you were to spin something, with a radius of 100 m, up to 2 rpm, you'd get close to 0.5 g of force with few adverse effects. It would take about 10x the amount of material of the ISS to build something like this.
> ...


I'm still shocked no one has tried to set up an experiment like that in space.  It doesn't even have to be a big sci-fi ring, it can just be a capsule with a counterweight that uses rockets to accelerate up to the desired RPMs.  Astronauts would then attempt to live/perform experiments in the capsule to see if it is viable or science fiction.

I'm not convinced centripetal force can substitute for gravity because one is using horizontal velocity to establish vertical velocity while the other simply is.  Motion sickness might be completely unavoidable without scaling to unreasonable sizes.


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## silkstone (Feb 24, 2018)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I'm still shocked no one has tried to set up an experiment like that in space.  It doesn't even have to be a big sci-fi ring, it can just be a capsule with a counterweight that uses rockets to accelerate up to the desired RPMs.  Astronauts would then attempt to live/perform experiments in the capsule to see if it is viable or science fiction.
> 
> I'm not convinced centripetal force can substitute for gravity because one is using horizontal velocity to establish vertical velocity while the other simply is.  Motion sickness might be completely unavoidable without scaling to unreasonable sizes.



The size of the structure still needs to be bigger than anything we have put up there so far, but it would be cool to see them doing more with it as it would indicate a new direction to our use of space.
Here is a good article on the topic: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130121-worth-the-weight

There have been quite a few done on earth to determine what the human body can stand. Anything over 2 rpm, makes people sick, though we can adapt to much higher rpm. The diameter, would also have to be at least 150 m (at a guess) to avoid the issue of noticing that your head is travelling faster than your feet, and with that sort of diameter, we are looking at a similar magnitude of force as you'd experience on the moon.

If we are to send people to Mars, I believe that we will eventually see spinning spacecraft. You could just build a spacecraft and spin the whole thing up after supplying it from earth and then stop the spin once you reach the destination. 

For space stations, doing that would lead to resupply issues as you either have to stop the spin for every resupply, which would cost a lot of energy, or match the spin with the resupplying vessel.
If you incorporated a (relatively) stationary axis in the centre of a ring, then you have a shit tonne of engineering considerations with the additional moving parts. Gaskets and seals are not a real good idea in space.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 24, 2018)

Not necessarily.  Just a capsule, a tether, and a counter weight.  Once the capsule is in space, launch the counter weight and do a slow burn to accelerate  up to the desired RPMs and perform experiments.  When it's time to quit or abort, do another slow burn to stop the rotation then real the counterweight back in or cut it loose and return to Earth.  150m tether length is totally doable.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Feb 24, 2018)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Not necessarily.  Just a capsule, a tether, and a counter weight.  Once the capsule is in space, launch the counter weight and do a slow burn to accelerate  up to the desired RPMs and perform experiments.  When it's time to quit or abort, do another slow burn to stop the rotation then real the counterweight back in or cut it loose and return to Earth.  150m tether length is totally doable.


I doubt this is very practical, nor is spinning the whole ship, you have instrument performance to consider here. Even with a huge wheel spinning the centrifugal force would still the spin the whole ship at a reduce velocity without a counter force.  All these rough ideas are great but you have see further than basic or simple ideas such as a tether.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 24, 2018)

The counter force is thrust provided at both the capsule and the counter weight. I give you ASCII art:

capsule here --> (>------------------------------------------------------------------------------[] <-- mass here (likely mostly fuel and tether mechanism)

Each side would likely need 6-way thrusters.  Totally doable.  First tests would likely have to be performed unmanned.  Tether would have to be redundant as well.


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## silkstone (Feb 24, 2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct


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## Space Lynx (Feb 24, 2018)

I really wish I understood how economics works. Like its great to imagine all of this stuff, but we haven't even paid for the first Gulf War yet, its still on a credit card. What happens when other countries start calling us out for writing blank checks, raising the debt ceiling, and basically making fake money as much as we need it? Eventually it all collapses or we start have to paying more taxes to pay for those wars... I don't know, I just don't get it. I'd love for NASA to have more of a budget personally, but I just don't understand how it all works... I asked my professor one day and he just ignored me, literally didn't even attempt an answer for me... is it possible someday it will be like first world war Germany and are currency will just become useless?


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 24, 2018)

Tempo3 is exactly what I'm talking about but CubeSat is..........tiny.

I guess it will work as a proof of concept so if it is successful, NASA may try a manned version.

Mars Direct sounds like the final goal.


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## silkstone (Feb 25, 2018)

lynx29 said:


> I really wish I understood how economics works. Like its great to imagine all of this stuff, but we haven't even paid for the first Gulf War yet, its still on a credit card. What happens when other countries start calling us out for writing blank checks, raising the debt ceiling, and basically making fake money as much as we need it? Eventually it all collapses or we start have to paying more taxes to pay for those wars... I don't know, I just don't get it. I'd love for NASA to have more of a budget personally, but I just don't understand how it all works... I asked my professor one day and he just ignored me, literally didn't even attempt an answer for me... is it possible someday it will be like first world war Germany and are currency will just become useless?



Money isn't really tangible. If you look at the economics of how Germany pulled itself out of recession following the first world war, it will give you a better understanding of how economics works. It's actually similar to what Trump promised he'd do for Americans (but never followed through on). It's more complicated now that there is much more global trade, but it all works based on the same principle. Supply and demand.



FordGT90Concept said:


> Tempo3 is exactly what I'm talking about but CubeSat is..........tiny.
> 
> I guess it will work as a proof of concept so if it is successful, NASA may try a manned version.
> 
> Mars Direct sounds like the final goal.



Yup, they seem like the most feasible next step as they would be cheaper. The problem of doing it on something in orbit is that it's really hard to start spinning it up and keep it in the same orbit. Once it is spinning, it's also pretty tricky to maneuver it and so correcting for orbital degradation or avoiding space junk would be extremely complex.  If you only need to get it spinning up and do a single course correction, like on a trip to mars, it's be much easier.

I also think that adding propulsion wouldn't be too much of a problem as you just add boosters perpendicular to the spin.  They'd have to be directional, if they were in orbit, but less so on a trip.

The mechanics of it all would still be extremely complex, but then it's just numbers.


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