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Cabbage wrote:A project from the 1950s that is still our best option to reach the stars: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Orio ... propulsion) A space ship propelled by nuclear bombs that it blasts behind itself.
BTJustice wrote:Cheers Boxer, I will look into the facebook thing. I hadn't noticed that but maybe because I'm the admin I get a different view.
Dave.
Doorstop wrote:
How many bombs would it take to get a ship to the sort of velocities for interstellar (or even meaningfull interplanetary) travel?Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. (Depends on the speed you want to reach.) You need about a thousand just to get into orbit. That being said, we are talking about a ship that can easily weight more than an aircraft carier. In fact, the heavier it is, the better it functions. That is assuming we are talking about interstellar travel. We need less within the Solar System. And another thing. The journalists call these nuclear devices 'bombs'. In fact they are not bombs but pulse devices.
Now double that because you need to decelerate when you reach your destination.Ok, but this is still not a problem because we are talking about a ship that may weight as much as we like.
Now double it again because you've got to do the same coming back.Not necessarily if we colonize Mars or reach the nearest stars.
How big is the ship going to be to carry that lot?Like I said, as big as we like. It may be as big as a city and weight as much as the Piramid of Cheops.
Now, take into account you've got to do a terrestrial launch of a craft that may well explode on take off due to malfunction. Carrying all that potential nuclear fallout?Not necessarily. It may be constructed into space. But even if it starts from Earth, the phisicists who came with this idea though of such a possibily (say of a pulse device that does not go off) and took it into account.
Let's not even get into the weight of the shielding required to protect passengers from the effects of hundreds if not thousands of nuclear explosions mere feet behind the craft they're travelling in.This is the best part. We need very heavy shielding anyway for two more reasons: first to protect the crew from the cosmic rays and second to protect the ship from the sudden jolts generated by the pulse units. Still, this is not a problem as the Orion project can lift ridiculously large payloads as it is based on reactions that are a million times more powerful than chemical ones. That is the beauty of this project compared to all contemporary space rockets: the heavier it is, the better.
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