Nuclear Orion Memories

Ran into this over at The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11..._solar_system/

"Tony Zuppero, one of [a few] would-be nuclear rocketeers, tells those
stories as he recalls them, with sometimes alarming candor, humor, and
disappointment," opined Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American
Scientists after linking to the memoir on his secrecy blog.
Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of
Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a
spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light,
using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)
Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans,
called Orion, for the Dyson space ship."

The free pdf of the book is he http://www.neofuel.com/inhabit/inhabit.pdf

Pat

Pat Flannery writes:

The free pdf of the book is he http://www.neofuel.com/inhabit/inhabit.pdf

Pat

So I've always wondered what would be easier and more cost effective.

A "fixed fuel" design based on a set number of stored, pre-built bombs,
or flying a production reactor that could produce plutonium and deuterium
and/or tritium on-the-fly as well as generate electricity for the spacecraft?

The bombs get built as needed and it gives the crew something to
do (yes, other than expanding the crew) during the interstellar legs of the
flight.

I'm purposely ignoring all the treaties that'd have to be redone in order
to enable any of this...


Dave

David Spain wrote:

So I've always wondered what would be easier and more cost effective.

A "fixed fuel" design based on a set number of stored, pre-built bombs,
or flying a production reactor that could produce plutonium and deuterium
and/or tritium on-the-fly as well as generate electricity for the spacecraft?

Way, way, too heavy unless your Orion spacecraft is something the size
of a Space Ark.

Pat

Pat Flannery writes:

David Spain wrote:

So I've always wondered what would be easier and more cost effective.

A "fixed fuel" design based on a set number of stored, pre-built bombs,
or flying a production reactor that could produce plutonium and deuterium
and/or tritium on-the-fly as well as generate electricity for the spacecraft?

Way, way, too heavy unless your Orion spacecraft is something the size of a
Space Ark.

Pat

Um, I thought the original Orion proposal was exactly that?
Are you thinking of a Goulden (better, faster, cheaper) version?

Dave

OM writes:

On Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:11:40 -0500, David Spain
wrote:

Um, I thought the original Orion proposal was exactly that?
Are you thinking of a Goulden (better, faster, cheaper) version?

...Grenades tossed out from behind a garbage can lid?

OM

Just a few cost overruns on that garbage can lid design...

:-D

Dave

David Spain wrote:

Um, I thought the original Orion proposal was exactly that?
Are you thinking of a Goulden (better, faster, cheaper) version?

Well, the one in the Orion report from 1964 is designed for use inside
the solar system.
Freeman Dyson may have been playing around with interstellar space ark
ideas for the propulsion system, but those never got funding for any
detailed studies by NASA or the Air Force.
About the time I found out the Dyson Sphere wasn't going to have a solid
shell on it, but consist of hundreds of thousands of little artificial
worlds orbiting a star - with all the fun gravitational interactions
that implied - I knew that Dyson was a world-class loon who had been
drinking herbal tea made with Carl Sagan's bong water. :-D

Pat

On Nov 17, 10:24*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
David Spain wrote:

Um, I thought the original Orion proposal was exactly that?
Are you thinking of a Goulden (better, faster, cheaper) version?

Well, the one in the Orion report from 1964 is designed for use inside
the solar system.
Freeman Dyson may have been playing around with interstellar space ark
ideas for the propulsion system, but those never got funding for any
detailed studies by NASA or the Air Force.
About the time I found out the Dyson Sphere wasn't going to have a solid
shell on it, but consist of hundreds of thousands of little artificial
worlds orbiting a star - with all the fun gravitational interactions
that implied - I knew that Dyson was a world-class loon who had been
drinking herbal tea made with Carl Sagan's bong water. :-D

Pat

You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Dyson contributed heavily to the original Orion concept - but no one
seems to recognize the facts that, albeit a few "skew" references to
the actual, circa 50's science-in-the-making, like:

1) ablation and opacity studies
2) ARPA/Air Force/NASA sponsorship
3) AEC security requirements [1]

A nation's right to the free use of a controlled substance such as
plutonium is indeed similar, if not (strangely) proportional to, its
right to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States [2]


American

[1]

In those days, it was the AEC, "... on a tour of nuclear facilities to
evaluate non-proliferation safeguards, ... At Nuclear Fuel Services'
commercial nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in West Valley, New
York, ... several containers with separated plutonium nitrate
solution, enough in the aggregate for at least two atomic bombs, were
in a small shack a few feet away from an ordinary chain-link fence and
more than 100 yards from the plant entrance, where the 'guard' had no
weapon of any kind."

- G. Dyson's book "Project Orion, the True Story of the Atomic
Spaceship

[2]

The "free market" use of plutonium - since plutonium becomes
"internationally inspected", should ONLY become limited w.r.t. a
wartime 'pacifist stance' - a stance that only exists as a failed
ideology, philisophically empty and zero-tolerance policies used by,
technologically starved and wholly bureaucratically dependent,
institutions of academia and over-legislated, co-dependent businesses.

Pacifism and zero-tolerance take away individual judgement and replace
rugged individualism with completely arbitrary, draconian rules and
regulations. The unintended consequences of draconian legislation are
the overly-bureaucratic mandates that punish or financially hurt
innocent entrepreneurs in the free market of ideas, as well as in the
free market of technologically sound scientific entrepreneurialism.

In sci.space.history message , Tue, 17
Nov 2009 16:45:26, David Spain posted:

So I've always wondered what would be easier and more cost effective.

A "fixed fuel" design based on a set number of stored, pre-built bombs,
or flying a production reactor that could produce plutonium and deuterium
and/or tritium on-the-fly as well as generate electricity for the spacecraft?

The bombs get built as needed and it gives the crew something to
do (yes, other than expanding the crew) during the interstellar legs of the
flight.


To go interstellar at a reasonable speed, using only what was launched
from Earth (or the Solar System), one should consider the relativistic
"increase in mass" and where that mass-energy will come from. All your
energy comes from fission; fission generates (IIRC) considerably less
energy per event than fusion does, and a fission event needs of the
order of a hundred times more mass directly involved than a fusion one
does.

To say anything meaningful about interstellar travel, one must be
familiar with the energetics.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+uk gives UK electric power
gross production as almost 400E9 kWh/yr; 400E12 * 8E3 Joules, say 3E18
Joules. Now c is 3E8 m/s, so to get to 0.1 C (40 years to Alpha
Centauri) with that energy P: E = 0.5 M V^2 or M = 2E/V^2 gives us M =
6E18 / 1E15 kg = 6 tonnes - AT 100% EFFICIENCY. That's the mass of an
Apollo capsule. Check the figures.

--
(c) John Stockton, nr London, UK. Turnpike v6.05.
Web URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ - w. FAQish topics, links, acronyms
PAS EXE etc : URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/ - see 00index.htm
Dates - miscdate.htm estrdate.htm js-dates.htm pas-time.htm critdate.htm etc.

On Nov 15, 5:21*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Ran into this over at The Register:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11..._solar_system/

"Tony Zuppero, one of [a few] would-be nuclear rocketeers, tells those
stories as he recalls them, with sometimes alarming candor, humor, and
disappointment," opined Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American
Scientists after linking to the memoir on his secrecy blog.
Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of
Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a
spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light,
using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)
Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans,
called Orion, for the Dyson space ship."

The free pdf of the book is hehttp://www.neofuel.com/inhabit/inhabit.pdf

Pat

This is a topic for Willam Mook, and you'd need 0.1 c.

~ BG

Dr J R Stockton wrote:


To go interstellar at a reasonable speed, using only what was launched
from Earth (or the Solar System), one should consider the relativistic
"increase in mass" and where that mass-energy will come from.

IIRC, the Dyson Orion Ark concept was supposed to top out at only a few
percent of lightspeed, so relativistic mass increase effects were
inconsequential.

Pat