[AR] NSWR (was Re: methane to methanol)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2017 18:45:48 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 1 Jun 2017, David Weinshenker wrote:
The other 1000+ S Isp monopropellant is of course HEU
uranium salts in water. Bob Zubrin's other other monster.
How practical (or impractical) is that, actually?
(I mean in terms of the technical feasibility...
Somewhat unclear. There is no question that the fuel is very expensive
and the exhaust would be very radioactive. There are potentially serious
design difficulties, notably preheating of the fuel in the plumbing en
route to the chamber. A solid answer about feasibility would require a
substantial study by one of the national nuclear labs -- they have the
right knowledge and tools for the job.
A year or so after Zubrin's original paper (JBIS Aug. 1991), I had a
chance to ask Steve Howe (then doing advanced-propulsion studies at Los
Alamos) about it. He said that it wasn't ridiculous, but between
technical concerns and fuel cost, it wasn't considered promising and so
hadn't been explored in depth.
clearly testing such an engine safely will be a challenge of its own: I
suspect you would need to do that in space, rather than exhausting a
stream of fresh fission fragments into an inhabited atmosphere!)
As Zubrin pointed out in the original paper, not only do you not want to
run the thing in an atmosphere (inhabited or not), you probably don't want
to run it within a planetary magnetosphere, or even pointed at one.
Henry
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