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We're building thermonuclear spaceships again–this time for real
- rbanffy 2y agoThe mass budgets they mention point to a super heavy lifter, or, in SpaceX terms, a Superheavy-Heavy, as you'd need 3 times the payload to LEO of a standard Starship. That's a very interesting prospect. Or, of course, assemble 3 big pieces in orbit.
- Someone 2y agoFTA: “First, electric thrusters have always been used to drive small, unmanned spacecraft. Scaling them up to accommodate the thousands of megawatts generated by nuclear reactors would require huge spaceships.” The largest nuclear power plant in the world is (or was; Wikipedia doesn’t have data for 2022 and later, but it doesn’t seem to be operational) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashiwazaki-Kariwa_Nuclear_Pow.... It can produce less than 8GW, and needs seven reactors to do that. So, that probably would make this the largest nuclear reactor ever built. I can see why the article also says “But this idea won’t be tested on DRACO”.
- jjk166 2y agoEditing of the title is subtly inaccurate. Actual title is "We’re building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real" and the article deals with nuclear thermal rockets (NTRs) which are fission reactors that heat a propellant. Thermonuclear refers to fusion. There are designs out there for thermonuclear spaceships, but this article isn't talking about them.
- LorenDB 2y agoThe title here is copy-paste verbatim from Ars when I posted it this morning. I assume Ars edited their title later.