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You can't use ion engines or any plasma thruster (see VIAZMA) to liftoff the surface of the Earth. They put out the power of a butterfly sneeze and you 10 billion butterfly sneezes to climb to Tranquility.
Now once you get into Earth orbit and make that last insertion burn into lunar or planetary or even interstellar transfer orbit you've supplied 99% of the energy or deltaV to go anywhere else so ion or plasma thrusts now become very valuable in making small deltaV changes to do some fancy navigation. Think of the weight savings and specific impulse of such engines. Just enough power to take Dawn to Vesta and then Ceres or Rosetta to a Comet.
They shouldn't be using solid rocket boosters at all. "Man-rated" and "solid rocket booster" shouldn't be used in the same sentence. At the very least they could use Aerojet's vastly superior one-piece casing design instead of Thiokol/ATK's old segmented design. Of course, ATK with its deep connections to various congresspeople and considerable lobbying power would never allow that to happen.
I'm more looking forward to seeing the re-made F1 liquid rocket engines in action. The F1 was an extremely reliable engine. And not that it matters, but they would also make for a significantly louder, bassier, and more impressive launch.
Solid rockets give you unequalled power for their volume and don't take hours or days to set up to launch (This is why the military likes solid fueled ICBMs or SLBMs). The space Shuttle and the Saturn V both put the same payload into low Earth orbit (The Shuttle Orbiter and its payload weighed about 120 tons) (Saturn S-IVB stage and Apollo lunar mission payload also weighed about 120 tons) but look at their relative sizes (I recommend building the 1:144 scale models of both). The Saturn V was big bulks and expensive to operate and set up. In todays dollars an Apollo Moon mission would set you back 2.5 billion dollars (current dollars) per mission (one of the reasons we quit doing Apollo when it was obvious we wouldn't have Soviet company on the Moon, They were too damn expensive ). The Shuttle wasn't cheap but only cost a quarter of an Apollo shot and we did over 135 missions fo the price of the entire Apollo program which saw 14 Saturn V shots. Also, a Shuttle stack was just as noisy and more smoky than any Apollo shot I've lived long enough to see both with my own eyes and ears.
You can't use ion engines or any plasma thruster (see VIAZMA) to liftoff the surface of the Earth. They put out the power of a butterfly sneeze and you 10 billion butterfly sneezes to climb to Tranquility.
Now once you get into Earth orbit and make that last insertion burn into lunar or planetary or even interstellar transfer orbit you've supplied 99% of the energy or deltaV to go anywhere else so ion or plasma thrusts now become very valuable in making small deltaV changes to do some fancy navigation. Think of the weight savings and specific impulse of such engines. Just enough power to take Dawn to Vesta and then Ceres or Rosetta to a Comet.
I've been reading about the old Nuclear engines. H2 liquid as the fuel. I'd still want a chemical first stage. But...
Then again there is the set off an A bomb under the rocket approach. It really works well in model form.
But if you want to go to Alpha Centauri then photo voltaic and ion thrusters, and you use the light from the destination start to accelerate with a big reflector. Then you use the light from our sun to decelerate.
I've been reading about the old Nuclear engines. H2 liquid as the fuel. I'd still want a chemical first stage. But...
Then again there is the set off an A bomb under the rocket approach. It really works well in model form.
But if you want to go to Alpha Centauri then photo voltaic and ion thrusters, and you use the light from the destination start to accelerate with a big reflector. Then you use the light from our sun to decelerate.
I am one who thinks nuclear power will need to be mastered if we plan to make a sustained push beyond the Moon and maybe if we qo on to build a lunar outpost the size of the US outpost at McMurdo Sound in Antarctica or the US Amundsen-Scoot Base at the South Pole. We got real close in the late 1960s with the NERVA nuclear rocket motor and its replacement of the J-2 engine on the Saturn V. It promised a four fold increase the payload sent to the lunar surface. Something one might want to do to make month long stays on the lunar surface and the construction of a lunar shelter underground to ride out solar storms.
The other use was this nuclear Saturn stage would have been the basis of building a Mars capable spaceship for a decent sized crew, Think 3 such stages clustered in orbit to push a spacecraft made from tried and trusted space station modules and several landing craft. In 1969-70 this sort of mission was proposed by von Braun and suggested in the Space Task Group plan for post Apollo mission planning for the 1980s (1981 or 1986). An American might have knelt down and picked up a Mars rock 30 years ago, NERVA got as far as an engineering demonstration model and was test fired at the AEC Nevada Test Site in 1968. Much was lost when the Apollo Applications project was cancelled in the early 1970s.
Nuclear rockets were also on the mind in the USSR for physics is the same for Soviets as Americans. Russian designer Chelomey designed a version of his URL (Model 700, todays Proton booster was his model 500 His UR700H (H=N in Cyrillic) had a nuclear core surrounded by 6 conventional boosters. It would take off on conventional propulsion and engage the nuclear element when safely away from the USSR and near the edge of the atmosphere. The nuclear engine was built and its hardware was shown to American vistors in he 1990s after the falloff the USSR. Rusia's other Chief Designer Korolyev
had a nuclear upper state for his N-1 rocket.
My choice is big reactor powered microwave driven plasma thrusters (Think a fusion reactor with a hole in it to generate 100 million deg. rocket thrust out the engine (which would be a nagnetic theta pinch ), They would look like the hexagonal arrays of the main engines on the Discovery 1 mission to Jupiter in the 1968 movie 2001 : A Space Odyessy. If you are a Star Trek fan this is impulse power.
My choice is big reactor powered microwave driven plasma thrusters (Think a fusion reactor with a hole in it to generate 100 million deg. rocket thrust out the engine (which would be a nagnetic theta pinch ), They would look like the hexagonal arrays of the main engines on the Discovery 1 mission to Jupiter in the 1968 movie 2001 : A Space Odyessy. If you are a Star Trek fan this is impulse power.
Ever read about a fizzler? At 50,000 psi magnetic field pressure it would only take several hundred lbs of active stuff to get out of the atmosphere.
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