nuclear space engine - would it work ??

Here's the crux of the problem. The experts pitch their case but in
the end it all boils down to "lay" people (no pun intended, but how
convenient for my point, that this is the central paragraph of the
article...):

Jack Linthicum wrote:
"I feel comfortable when we go through these kind of things," Brevard
County emergency management chief Bob Lay said. "I would not feel
comfortable if we didn't do this. This lets me see what kinds of
problems it might present for the county and then to look at those
kinds of problems and address those problems with some of the people
here that are leaders in this field in the nation."


I wonder how Mr. Lay would have felt had he gotten a different "assessment"
from those without a vested interest in the mission and an anti-nuclear bias.

The issue is there is no societal consensus on the value of space exploration.
If this launch malfunctions it could be then end of nuclear space probes
launched from the US, even if there is *no* radiological hazard resulting.

When guys like Bob Lay become convinced that the risk just isn't worth it,
you're finished.

Prove to me that democratic governments have a good track record of opening
frontiers. (I'm *not* talking about freely operating private enterprises).

Dave

In article . com,
wrote:

Steve Hix wrote:

Politics stopped their use; until you can convince the Greenies that it
would be safe enough to put the (cold) engine in orbit before fueling
and lighting it off, we won't see any.

Politics quite possibly *would* have stopped the use of nuclear
engines, but they were stopped even earlier by the lack of a mission.

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

Robert Kolker wrote:
Steve Hix wrote:

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

Bob Kolker

so is non-ionizing radiation

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiation_n...ing/index.html

Jack Linthicum wrote:
Robert Kolker wrote:
Steve Hix wrote:
It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.
That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

Bob Kolker

so is non-ionizing radiation

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/radiation_n...ing/index.html


So is staying outdoors in the Sun too long. Therefore we should eliminate the Sun!

Robert Kolker wrote:

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

Half-baked gogglebox do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you! Pernicious
nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to
have them, too.

/ff

Steve Hix wrote:

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

Bob Kolker

Jochem Huhmann wrote:

And I even dimly remember some russian, err, soviet mission with an
(experimental?) ion engine much earlier... can't find it right now. It
was some interplanetary probe, I think.


At the time, some in the U.S. thought Voskhod 1 was equipped with ion
engines due to a somewhat garbled Soviet description of the spacecraft
which stated it had "ion plotters of the direction of the ship's
velocity vector". What these really were was a set of ion detectors that
allowed the spacecraft to determine its orientation in relation to its
orbital path.

Pat

FearlessFerret wrote:
Robert Kolker wrote:

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

Half-baked gogglebox do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you! Pernicious
nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to
have them, too.

/ff

I'm not sure one hundred / year is the correct dose, but according to
this Yale study Rachel Carson should have eaten a hormetic dose of DDT.

http://spacebombardment.blogspot.com...r-and-ddt.html

"{cancer}odds ratio is ... 0.8 {20% less} ... for DDT when the highest
{exposure} quartile was compared with the lowest."

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:

Steve Hix wrote:

It's more than nuclear-thermal engines that have been affected; any kind
of nuclear power source in space gets kicked around.

That is because the eco-weenies have decided that ionizing radiation is
Evil.

We ought to start a fad for granite furniture. Some with a goodly
fraction of thorium in it.

On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:38:23 -0500, Robert Kolker
wrote:

Bob Kolker

....Bob, I've been meaning to ask: any relation to the legendary Rich
Kolker?

OM
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