The whole single-purpose type solution that seems to consistently be proposed here bothers me. I mean, yes, I understand that one has to start somewhere, and th

The whole single-purpose type solution that seems to consistently be proposed here bothers me. I mean, yes, I understand that one has to start somewhere, and that the conditions one would need to meet on other bodies would be radically different - but as an engineer "niche" solutions bother me, and type solutions are almost universally better. I fear that for as long as we un-necessarily bind ourselves to limited and massive chemical propellants, rocketry will remain forever an inefficient and expensive business. I fear our dreams of our future in space died with nuclear propulsion. Thermal nuclear rockets would be compact and could fuel up with pretty much any old crap, be it hydrogen, methane, co2, so long as it can be made cryonic and heated by fission to blast out of a nozzle. Irradiation can be made a not-huge problem by using shielded heat-exchangers. Adds mass, but not as much mass as solid or liquid fuels and oxidisers. Nuclear pulse propulsion is a more controversial proposition as it typically involves significantly irradiating wherever you go, but if you're dealing with non-atmospheric bodies, or bodies so utterly inhospitable that irradiating them isn't going to make a jot of difference, again, why not? Well, the why not commonly given is that if you lose a chemical rocket carrying a nuclear reactor you have a scope for fallout on earth, but then again, we fly RTGs, and if there aren't spaceborne nuclear launch platforms I'll eat my hat. Anyway. I really wish we would be brave enough to experiment with new tech, rather than incrementally improving existing tech. The horse is better than it was, to be sure, but it's still a horse. Some articles on this stuff if anyone fancies getting lost in a wiki-hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto (holy nuclear ramjet, batman) Progression of nuclear thermal rockets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Rover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Timberwind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Timberwind