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Once you have that lifting capacity, Orion drives are probably a bad idea. Orion drives are great if you just consider performance, but not cost. It gets it's
by Tuna-Fish 7y ago
Once you have that lifting capacity, Orion drives are probably a bad idea.
Orion drives are great if you just consider performance, but not cost. It gets it's great ISP and thrust at the cost of being very inefficient in it's use of fissiles. If you can lift propellant into orbit at the cost SpaceX is projecting, for any in-system work it is more economical to use much less flashy nuclear thermal rockets with much worse ISP, because the propellant is cheaper than the fissiles.
- DuskStar 7y agoAnd if you are willing to throw out the fissiles, why not a Nuclear Salt Water Rocket? [0] (warning: engineering realities may make this impossible) (one of a very short list of possibilities for a buildable-within-a-century torchship) Other downsides include "using it for take-offs will leave a large crater that will glow blue for several hundred million years, as will everything downwind in the fallout area", but who really cares about takeoff areas? (That's for the silly plebs left behind on the ground to worry about - you're headed to SPACE!) 0: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#nswr http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php...