nuclear space engine - would it work ??

In article TywVg.8$i84.2@trnddc01, David Spain wrote:
Of course, I don't expect that this fact will make the politics of
launching a nuclear engine much easier.

Oh it will happen. It's just that manned space exploration is passing away
from the democracies that are too narcissistic to care.

Nonsense. What we've seen so far (and what NASA is trying to return to)
is just incidental dabbling. The days of real space exploration by free
men still lie ahead, and in fact are getting pretty close. The cartoons
are ending, and the curtain is about to go up on the main feature.

If all this sounds bizarre and fantastic, you need to stop thinking in
terms of the socialist dream -- spaceflight for the glory of the almighty
state, the way NASA does it -- and start considering the sort of space
exploration that free people might do for their own reasons. It's already
possible to fly in space for any reason you think sufficient, if you've
got the price of the ticket. It hasn't worked out quite the way we
thought -- who would have *imagined* a world in which the only commercial
spaceline requires you to learn Russian to get a seat assignment?!? -- and
it's too damned expensive, but these nuisances will change soon, when real
competition begins.

NASA will never, ever put men on Mars. Their target date for it is
receding more than a year per year. But the first footprints on Mars
almost certainly will be those of free men.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article %%wVg.91$Gp4.61@trnddc08, David Spain wrote:
"I feel comfortable when we go through these kind of things," Brevard
County emergency management chief Bob Lay said...

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 significant fact is that those people didn't bother showing up. Their
numbers and importance have been vastly exaggerated, in the past, by a
handful of noisy extremists. They are disappearing into footnotes in the
history books.

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

Why do we care about democratic governments, when freely operating private
enterprises can do a much better job?
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Steve Hix wrote:
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.

Wrong verb tense. They *used to* get kicked around. The nuclear power
source for MSL has gone through without a murmur. The only remaining
problem is the massive paperwork overheads imposed as a defence against
now-nonexistent protests. It may be a little while before people get
brave enough to start trimming those back.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Robert Kolker wrote:
Yep, and much the best way to do that is to convert the sunlight to
electricity in space, and beam it down as microwaves...

For which we do not need a manned space program.

For which we need men in space, for the same reason we generally use
hands-on machinery to build hydroelectric dams: because in the real
world, automation and remote control are not up to such complex jobs.

If all you want to do is fly around and snap pictures from afar, robots do
that fairly well. People who are optimistic about robots doing much more
complex jobs in space in the near future typically have not done any real
robotics.

Our unmanned programs,
by and large, have earned their keep. Not so, our manned programs.

The only manned program to date which has tried to do something ambitious
in space -- Apollo -- cost about ten times as much as its unmanned
contemporaries did, and returned a hundred to a thousand times the
results. If that's not earning its keep, what is?

(The shuttle is a less happy example, but then, its main purpose was to
keep a lot of people employed. It did that very well.)

If you want a more modern example, it was big news a week or two ago, when
the Opportunity rover reached the edge of Victoria crater. To do this, it
has traveled *ten kilometers* in just about three years -- a stupendous
accomplishment for a remotely-operated robot. The Apollo 15 crew traveled
that far in their first day at Hadley Rille, i.e. about a factor of 1000
higher productivity. (Of course, Opportunity has done more in that time
than just travel... but so did Scott and Irwin.) The MERs cost roughly a
billion dollars; charge half of that to Opportunity, and we have a wash
on productivity per dollar if the first manned Mars expedition costs less
than five hundred billion. Even NASA could probably do it for a tenth of
that, if the project wasn't managed by JSC.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

On Sat, 7 Oct 2006 06:38:37 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

People who are optimistic about robots doing much more
complex jobs in space in the near future typically have not done any real
robotics.

....Take note, kids: Henry has just given us new .sig fodder!

OM
--
]=====================================[
] OMBlog - http://www.io.com/~o_m/omworld [
] Let's face it: Sometimes you *need* [
] an obnoxious opinion in your day! [
]=====================================[

If you want a more modern example, it was big news a week or two ago, when
the Opportunity rover reached the edge of Victoria crater. To do this, it
has traveled *ten kilometers* in just about three years -- a stupendous
accomplishment for a remotely-operated robot. The Apollo 15 crew traveled
that far in their first day at Hadley Rille, i.e. about a factor of 1000
higher productivity. (Of course, Opportunity has done more in that time
than just travel... but so did Scott and Irwin.) The MERs cost roughly a
billion dollars; charge half of that to Opportunity, and we have a wash
on productivity per dollar if the first manned Mars expedition costs less
than five hundred billion. Even NASA could probably do it for a tenth of
that, if the project wasn't managed by JSC.

Did our boys find water on the Moon? If not, they were wasting time and
money with regard to building settlements or habitats on the Moon. No
water, no colonies or habitats.

Bob Kolker

Henry Spencer wrote:

Nonsense. What we've seen so far (and what NASA is trying to return to)
is just incidental dabbling. The days of real space exploration by free
men still lie ahead, and in fact are getting pretty close. The cartoons
are ending, and the curtain is about to go up on the main feature.

Yoda says: Do not your breath hold else purple turn you will. The tqx
payers will not joyfully submit to being mugged for another Kennedyesque
Space Circus and private firms will not fund foolishness. They are
profit oriented.

Bob Kolker

"Robert Kolker" wrote in message
...
Did our boys find water on the Moon?

1. They weren't tasked to do that, because

2. they weren't sent to where the water was expected to be, because

3. the technology at the time wasn't considered reliable enough to do
missions much beyond the lunar equator.

They weren't expected to find water, so they didn't waste their time looking
for it, since they weren't sent to scout for future colonies.

*Now*, the technology is sufficiently advanced that it should be fairly safe
to visit the lunar poles and farside.

In article ,
(Henry Spencer) wrote:

NASA will never, ever put men on Mars.

What, they'll never rent Russian equipment or buy tickets on a National
Geographic expedition?

Henry Spencer wrote:

It hasn't worked out quite the way we
thought -- who would have *imagined* a world in which the only commercial
spaceline requires you to learn Russian to get a seat assignment?!?

Consider the kinds of untempered-individualist-dominated, troubled,
fragmented terrestial societies depicted is SF writing with pioneering
commercial spaceflight - Heinlein for example. And then consider how
much closer post-soviet Russia is to being such a society than the US
has been at any point in the space age.

Leading edge commercial spaceflight happens in a society where
everything has a price; the question is if this (and related benefits)
are justification for having to live in such a society.