The de facto Western ban on testing in the atmosphere means testing will
have to be off-planet. This favors “known” designs that can be relied upon
to produce a usable vehicle on the first try.
If reuse is a part of the plan, then some sort of refueling facility is
implied, all in a nuclear safe orbit (1000 km, generally). Getting a new
payload on a hot vehicle is left as a problem for the reader.
Bill
On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 10:15 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Thu, 22 Aug 2019, anthony@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Have any experiments been conducted using Zubrin’s nuclear salt-water
rocket (NSWR) concept to verify the design or has it fallen into the
”anything that’s nuclear” black hole?
As far as I know, nothing's happened on it. Might be just the obvious
technical problems and the extremely expensive fuel and the political
problems of anything nuclear; might be that there's some fundamental flaw
which isn't obvious.
The cost to even get to the experimental stage wouldn’t be trivial
seeing this isn’t the 50s.
Even more-orthodox nuclear rockets are hampered because it's no longer
acceptable to release fission products into the atmosphere. For them,
it's leakage, but NSWR deliberately has fission products in its exhaust,
so it's a whole lot worse.
I subscribe to the model that if we are going to accomplish anything
*really* significant in space flight in the next generation, we have to
get the known chemical reaction approach monkey off our back.
I'm not sure beyond-chemical performance is truly mandatory, but it sure
would help.
Henry
