NASA living in a dream world

Forget the replacement for the Shuttle (otherwise known as the Russians),
NASA's loony plans for interplanetary rockets is a joke. There are two
kinds of technology under discussion. Ancient chemical rockets that will
never, ever ferry people even as far as Mars. Any trip lasting years will
fail due to some kind of failure. With the rockets, air supply, food
supplies, the mental disposition of the crew. Rockets are worthless for
manned trips beyond the Moon.
The second techology is the fantasy technology. The ion engines, the
nuclear pulse rockets, the solar sails, in other words, the stuff that will
remain on the drawing board for the next 1000 years being too complex, or
ultimately unworkable.
Mankind will one day have to leave Earth, and the only way they will ever
do it, is with the Project Orion technology. Low-tech, hugely powerful,
able to launch an entire Moonbase worth of materials in one shot. Or send a
ship to Mars in three weeks.

Rich wrote:
Forget the replacement for the Shuttle (otherwise known as the Russians),
NASA's loony plans for interplanetary rockets is a joke. There are two
kinds of technology under discussion. Ancient chemical rockets that will
never, ever ferry people even as far as Mars. Any trip lasting years will
fail due to some kind of failure.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, I must warn you of the difficulties.
I foresee all sorts of unforeseen problems.

Jim Hacker: Such as?

Sir Humphrey: If I could foresee them, they wouldn't be unforeseen.

With the rockets, air supply, food
supplies, the mental disposition of the crew. Rockets are worthless for
manned trips beyond the Moon.
The second techology is the fantasy technology. The ion engines, the
nuclear pulse rockets, the solar sails, in other words, the stuff that
will
remain on the drawing board for the next 1000 years being too complex, or
ultimately unworkable.
Mankind will one day have to leave Earth, and the only way they will ever
do it, is with the Project Orion technology. Low-tech, hugely powerful,
able to launch an entire Moonbase worth of materials in one shot. Or send
a
ship to Mars in three weeks.

We'll set up the launch pad in your back yard. What's
a few dirty nukes amongst friends?

On Nov 19, 11:36*pm, Rich wrote:

There are two
kinds of technology under discussion. *Ancient chemical rockets that will
never, ever ferry people even as far as Mars.

Chemical rockets have ferried instrumental probes to landings on Mars,
and flybys as far away as Neptune.

The second techology is the fantasy technology. The ion engines, the
nuclear pulse rockets, the solar sails, in other words, the stuff that will
remain on the drawing board for the next 1000 years being too complex, or
ultimately unworkable.

Ion engines have a high delta-V, but very low thrust. Much the same
can be said of solar sails.

If it is decided that we wish to send an instrumented probe to, say,
Jupiter, and we want to save launch costs by waiting 50 years for the
space probe to get there... then we wouldn't have to wait 1000 years
to develop the technology to do that. Ion drives could be built now,
if we wanted.

So the problem isn't that they're fantasy technology (unlike, say, the
space elevator) but that they don't do anything useful.

Mankind will one day have to leave Earth, and the only way they will ever
do it, is with the Project Orion technology.

I will say that I'm not unsympathetic to humanity regarding space
travel as important enough to justify discarding political
correctness.

If we want to get men to the outer solar system, we will need
something fancy, and nuclear probably is the way to go. But do we need
it to go to the Moon? No. So if we start L5 colonies with lunar
materials, we don't need it for that. And we don't need it for Mars
either.

Before there will be popular support for using nuclear technology for
space exploration, there will have to be enough progress in space as
to convince people that space is _important_ enough to justify
discarding foolish fears in order to proceed. In the current
situation, that is not possible.

Nuclear rockets to make it cheaper to feed the ISS? Bad enough taxes
are wasted on it, never mind risking fallout.

So a chemical rocket landing on Mars to make people feel good about
space again, or something like that, is kind of a pre-requisite, I
think.

John Savard