[Coco] Re: off-topic, space program

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 14 January 2004 19:04, jimcox at miba51.com wrote:
>On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 17:30:50 -0600
>
>  Roger Taylor <rtaylor at bayou.com> wrote:
>>At 04:59 PM 1/14/2004 -0600, you wrote:
>>Mars has been a source of fascination for me since I saw
>>the first Viking lander images. I completely agree with
>>your sentiments.  Thirty years is a long time to wait.
>>Twenty years to return man to the moon seems a little
>>ridiculous considering we accomplished that feat once
>>before in a much shorter time period with more primitive
>>technology.
>>
>>>$87 billion could have easily put us on Mars in a decade
>>>but that's another story for another off-topic thread.
>>>Brad
>>
>>Yep, it's rather upsetting.  I just wanted to know if
>>anybody else shared anywhere close to my opinion.  :)
>
>The fact that they are talking about an Apollo like
>vehicle is pretty much a sign that the shuttle will be
>phased out and not replaced by another winged craft.  A
>lot of people say that the weight added wings for a
>controlled reentry adds to the cost of fuel, but what is
>the cost of a small fleet of ships to recover the return
>capsule?  That will be that way that the next generation
>of vehicles will return.
>
>I'd rather see us focus on a new space plane, an Apollo
>like vehicle for trans-lunar missions, and a manned
>station on the moon by 2015.  While it would nice to go to
>Mars, I'd like to see us get back to the Moon and do some
>near Earth missions like to that one asteriod that is
>temporarily in an eliptical orbit around Earth (sort of a
>second moon, but not officially consdered one) If there
>were an trans-lunar vehicle based on Apollo, you could
>have it equipted for emergency reentry, but I would still
>like to see something like what Rutan is developing come
>on line.
>
>Jim

Check around, chasing the links off of /. or kuro5hin, I forget which 
now (craft you know) there is a story there that discusses the 
promethious project.  We need a heavy lifter?  How about 2 million 
pounds of payload into a translunar orbit, with enough fuel left over 
to do a powered all the way to the landing pad retro-rocket landing 
when it gets back.  They did the testing back in the late 60's and 
'70's, but the anti-nukers managed to get the funding pulled.  

Polution from the burnt fuel? Pure hydrogen, and it isn't even burnt 
until it comes in contact at its elevated temps with airborn oxygen, 
and then the byproduct is pure water/steam, a really, really 
obnoxious by product. :)

The active part of the reactor itself is running on uranium 
hexafloride, a gas, not a solid, in a magnetic bottle surrounded by a 
quartz enclosure which prevents any mixing of the reactor gas with 
the exhausted propellant gas, and is running at a core temp of about 
30,000 degrees K.  At that temp, its output energy is all ultraviolet 
(they say the human eye cannot see it when running at operating 
temperature, truely black light!) and the resultant heat transfer by 
radiant energy to the exhausted gas, hydrogen, is very efficient.  
Because the reactor is running in a gaseous state already, it cannot 
suffer a meltdown, and there would appear to be several ways of 
controlling any runaways it might try, some with reaction times in 
the sub-microsecond area.  Its been tested, it runs, and it hasn't 
blown anybody up yet, or poisoned any ranchers sheep.  Any 
instabilities in the reaction process during those tests seemed to be 
largely self-quenching.  Its time to fine tune the mechanics and get 
on with it.  And we can probably do it long before 2020 if we put a 
kennedy-esce face on it.

For all the anti-nukers out there, yes, improperly handled, some of 
this stuff isn't very friendly. This particular gas is no exception, 
but it doesn't take exotic metals to build the tank you ship it in 
either.

OTOH, I've handled, with my bare hands, a rather sizable rod of u-235 
(or u-238, craft again) (2.5" diameter, a foot long, and lets just 
leave it at *heavy*) that was driving the geiger counters to 
saturation on their highest range.  

Even with all that activity, it was still cold to the touch, and 
looked a bit like one of its lighter weight relatives, gold, only 
darker colored, more like aged bronze.

That was in 1947 when the atomic energy commission had a booth at the 
IA state fair, and I was curious george type kid of 13, makeing my 
cigarette money fixing radios then.  The nuances of the cold war 
hadn't set in yet, so they were pretty open about it, they wanted to 
commercialize it and were doing all the public face time they could 
find people to do.

Close to 60 years later, I'm still here...  To me, its another source 
of energy thats virtually free.  Like solar or wind.

Oh, I forgot to mention the waste disposal is easy enough, just aim 
the exhaust at the sun and feed the used up & dirty gas into the 
propellant plumbing.  One could even do this with much of the stuff 
we've got sitting around in water pools for storage now by using this 
thing to first vaporize the dirty stuff, then toss it out headed in 
the direction of the sun.  We could get rid of 50,000 lbs of that 
stuff, all the while doing a trip to mars in a month or so.  The sun 
would not notice it at all.

Find and read the article, its all been thought out fairly well.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap,
ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.