Greetings,
From: jpreisig@aol.com
Hi to John Miller, Marie Miller, Tom LaBone, Nisy Ipe, Kevin Nelson,etc.
The notion of fission powered space travel is quite interesting,
although I'm
sure the general public would still be terrified to see it in practice.
The jump from chemical propellants to fission-based propulsion clearly
brings one from eV energies to MeV energies, thus allowing travel times from
(and to) Mars to be reduced from 2 years to roughly 2 weeks. I think travel
times less than 2 weeks would not be good for the astronauts.
In the last few years, on television I've seen a program about a
gas-cooled
fission reactor, with fuel consisting of uranium (???) enclosed in spherical
ceramic pellets. It was a German-American research effort (involving some
fellow named Krueger and others). The reactor cooling was switched off, and
for several days the fuel was allowed to heat up. The heating increased
but eventually did not cause structural problems with the fuel geometry.
Thus,
the reactor was stable against some sort of cooling turn-off "accident".
I believe such a reactor would be a reasonable fission propulsion unit,
providing
it was efficient enough to get the job done. It might even be good enough
to be the fundamental design unit for future U.S. power reactors, if we ever
start building them again (even just as replacement reactors for the reactors
that are moving out of service in the next 10-20 years).
Does anyone know more about this reactor research effort, and if the
work
is still in progress???
Eventually, the folks at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) may get
the NSTX (National Spherical Torous eXperiment) to become small enough to
be placed on a spacecraft, for use as a fusion propulsion drive. Check out
the
PPPL web page for details on the NSTX, They've come a long way from
donut shaped Tokomaks (i.e. the TFTR).
See you on the space station....Honest!!!!!
Joseph R. Preisig,
Ph.D.