That Time Congress Considered Building Cities In Space

"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

William Mook wrote:

ADVANCED FUSION PULSE PROPULSION

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Projec...ft_Systems#3.2

Consider a fusion powered rocket with 23,300 km/sec exhaust speed.


Consider a pixie dust powered rocket with superluminal exhaust
speed...



Sorry Fred, but you need a copious amount of thread before I can consider
that!

Copious amounts of math is what makes it work!


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

On Monday, December 15, 2014 3:48:47 AM UTC+13, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

William Mook wrote:

ADVANCED FUSION PULSE PROPULSION

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Projec...ft_Systems#3.2

Consider a fusion powered rocket with 23,300 km/sec exhaust speed.


Consider a pixie dust powered rocket with superluminal exhaust
speed...



Sorry Fred, but you need a copious amount of thread before I can consider
that!

Copious amounts of math is what makes it work!


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

Anyone who thinks a reactor and engine design by J.E. Jones, R. E. MacPherson, and J. P. Nichols, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is anything other than tremendously practical engineering is not living in the real world.

http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1992/3445605715535.pdf

Congress loves to move jobs to a distance. Just think the control
management would have of a space based work force. They could pay wages
in oxygen! Excess population? Just recycle the blue faced subjects
to the digestion tanks.

But first Congress will move in shorter steps by approving the new
free trade agreement so that jobs will go to Vietnam for it cheaper wages
as compared to China. Not jobs in space but jobs at a distance. And I
suppose more jobs in Indonesia, Cambodia and Lao Country will result. There industry will blacken the air and add more heavy metals and more chlorinated dioxins to the soils.

Congress counts those who count...................Trig

Anyone who thinks a reactor and engine design by J.E. Jones, R. E. MacPherson, and J. P. Nichols, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is anything other than tremendously practical engineering is not living in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKqdePEwEkc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6gKFvPjGpQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiVej1rccs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znmZeEycRwE



On Monday, December 15, 2014 8:35:46 AM UTC-5, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, December 15, 2014 3:48:47 AM UTC+13, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

William Mook wrote:

ADVANCED FUSION PULSE PROPULSION

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Projec...ft_Systems#3.2

Consider a fusion powered rocket with 23,300 km/sec exhaust speed.



Consider a pixie dust powered rocket with superluminal exhaust
speed...



Sorry Fred, but you need a copious amount of thread before I can consider
that!

Copious amounts of math is what makes it work!


Anyone who thinks a reactor and engine design by J.E. Jones, R. E. MacPherson, and J. P. Nichols, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is anything other than tremendously practical engineering is not living in the real world.

http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1992/3445605715535.pdf


I'll just note that there's no such hard design in what you cited. As
usual, you haven't bothered to either read or understand your own
cites.

--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

On Thursday, December 18, 2014 6:42:11 PM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

Anyone who thinks knows that you're a jabbering loon.

Anyone who thinks a reactor and engine design by J.E. Jones, R. E. MacPherson, and J. P. Nichols, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is anything other than tremendously practical engineering is not living in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKqdePEwEkc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6gKFvPjGpQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiVej1rccs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znmZeEycRwE



On Monday, December 15, 2014 8:35:46 AM UTC-5, Fred J. McCall wrote:
William Mook wrote:

On Monday, December 15, 2014 3:48:47 AM UTC+13, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
...

William Mook wrote:

ADVANCED FUSION PULSE PROPULSION

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Projec...ft_Systems#3.2

Consider a fusion powered rocket with 23,300 km/sec exhaust speed.



Consider a pixie dust powered rocket with superluminal exhaust
speed...



Sorry Fred, but you need a copious amount of thread before I can consider
that!

Copious amounts of math is what makes it work!


Anyone who thinks a reactor and engine design by J.E. Jones, R. E. MacPherson, and J. P. Nichols, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is anything other than tremendously practical engineering is not living in the real world.

http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1992/3445605715535.pdf


I'll just note that there's no such hard design in what you cited. As
usual, you haven't bothered to either read or understand your own
cites.

--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Verbal abuse, the last refuge of the scoundrel.

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/colu...57316-Feb2012/

When I was in Aerospace Engineering graduate school at the Ohio State University, I was involved with micro-fission propulsion studies at OSU in conjunction with Penn State University back in the 1990s.

At OSU Dr. Peter Turchi led a team that used a form of plasma pinch technology to take a tiny wire of nearly pure plutonium or uranium, about the size of a paper clip, but massing twice as much - 1 gram instead of 1/2 gram - folded into a shape similar to that of a baseball seam. This shape allowed the wire to interact with its own magnetic field to compress it to point! Then, we ran 'God's own current' from a large bank of capacitors through the tiny wire, to quote Dr. Turchi! This compressed the wire and briefly achieved criticality for the tiny bomblet.

In this we we achieved pressures far higher than possible with chemical compressors! A chemical explosive might if well shaped achieve 3x resting density in plutonium. An electromagnetic pinch easily achieved 15x resting density! This increased density vastly reduced critical mass. Add to this a MEMS scale Penning trap with a modest amount of anti-matter stored inside, at the center of this tiny paper clip, and you had a situation where the anti-protons interacted with the fissile material increasing neutron yield from 2 neutrons to something like 9 neutrons per fission. This made critical mass much smaller still resulting in complete burn-up of the Plutonium paperclip. In the end, 71.82 GJ of the 83.61 GJ available turned into propulsive force (with the unused remainder being gamma rays and neutrons!) A barrel of crude oil contains 6.1 GJ, so you can see that this tiny wisp of metal contained the equivalent of nearly a dozen barrels of oil!

With a 3000 sec Isp, which translates to a 29.42 km/sec exhaust speed, we could produce 1.14 MN of thrust (250,000 lbf thrust) by exploding 37,865 bomblets of 1 gram each, per second! This is 2.72 quadrillion watts of power! By comparison all of human industry uses only 0.017 quadrillion watts of power! So, you can see the capacity of this sort of technology!

Rocket engine exhausts can be used in conjunction with Magneto Hydro Dynamic (MHD) generators like the Inverse Cyclotron Converter to convert nearly all the jet energy into electrical current!

http://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/...PhysRev.80.305

What could we do with a 2.72 Q-watt generator? Well, we could take 621.5 billion litres of sea water per hour and extract 69.1 million metric tons of hydrogen per hour. We could then combine the hydrogen with 380.1 million metric tons of atmospheric CO2 per hour to produce 138.2 million metric tons of methane per hour along with 360.8 billion litres of process water per hour. Now, our atmosphere contains 400 ppm CO2 which is up dramatically form 285 ppm CO2 in pre-industrial times. Now, Earth's atmosphere is 5.15e18 kg. So, CO2 masses 3.72e15 kg and to return to pre-industrial levels requires the removal of 904.83 trillion metric tons of CO2. Thus 1 nuclear rocket of the type described above, powering an Inverse Cycltron Converter, which in turn powers a huge electrolytic system, would have to operate 100 days to return the Earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial composition.

What do we do with all the methane?

The methane is easily converted to either carbon or liquid fuels using microwaves tuned to various resonant frequencies in the gas

https://web.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/prep...03-04_0973.pdf

This allows us to make any manner of fuel we like, (and pay for the process) but more importantly, since our fuel use even in a very rich world is only a small fraction of even one of these engines, we can take the excess and pump it back into the ground! Excess methane into the gas wells. Excess oil into the oil wells. Excess carbon in to the coal seams! This will give the oil riggers and drillers and coal miners something to do! For 100 days at least!

After that, the engine could be retired from service on Earth, and be used to lift payloads into space! A 250,000 lbf rocket engine can efficiently lift 200,000 lbs of take of weight. With a 3000 sec Isp, the engine only 53,700 lbs of that weight need be propellant. Allowing another 40,000 lbs for inert weight of the flight vehicle, leaves over 106,000 lbs of useful load that can be lifted into space! In space specific impulse can be radically increased using ion rockets! This reduces thrust, but makes the system even more fuel efficient! Thus, over 75,000 lbs - a shipping container - can be transported in days to weeks - anywhere in the solar system - and back!

In the process, we convert the world's nuclear weapons - both atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb - into strategically useless, propulision bomblets that don't even work unless you load up the Penning traps at the centre of each with anti-protons. Since there are only two sources of anti-protons on the planet, you've just created a way to get everyone to turn their bombs into propulsion units, that can only be used as designed - and get rid of them in a way that makes it impossible to cheat.

In order to minimize pollution on Earth, you basically put the propulsion unit into orbit and beam energy to electrolysis units located strategically around the world and operate them for 100 days. The nuclear unit flies off to do a manned grand tour of the solar system, returning to the moon, to park, and build a city on the moon!

haha - this is the sort of program I dreamed of as I worked on these things.. I figured it would be easy once the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now, with very high compression densities, made possible with electromagnetic compression, and the ability to impart nuclear transformations by the judicious addition of anti-protons, we are free from the constraints of using fissile material! We can use a very small amount of fissile material to promote transfer reactions that then promote fusion reactions! In this context we can use Lithium-6 isotope with Deuterium hydrogen isotope to allow the Lithium to absorb a neutron, fission into Helium-4 and Tritium hydrogen isotpe, releasing a lot of energy. The energetic Tritium then collides with the Deuterium making a D+T reaction forming Helium-4 and giving back the original neutron, again releasing a lot of energy. This Jetter Cycle, was first discovered in 1950 and is the basis of the 'dry' type hydrogen bomb. The technology outlined here make nearly fission free hydrogen bomblets - think hydrogen hand grenades - possible! Very tiny bomblets handled very rapidly make rockets (and generators) even more capable (and powerful) than the one described above! We can in short, move freely into the cosmos - after we correct the excesses of our ancestors.