4 ms·
More Bounce to the Ounce
- mc32 3mo agoWild cowboy ideas of yore. Will we ever be able to make it safer to use on earth or would we save that for a moon base -get to the moon and from there blast away with these atomic fahrting machines…
- dylan604 3mo agoWith hindsight being 20/20 and all, it always makes me laugh at how 1950s pro-atomics a lot of things seemed to be. Yes, it was the new, like AI is today so everyone was all about it. Yet there never seemed to be any concerns of the downsides of things like the pesky nuclear waste or fallout. Looking back at films and magazines, the feel of TFA and Fallout are not out of place which is part of what makes them good.
- showerst 3mo agoWith any luck, by the time we're serious about sending big spacecraft out and about we'll have figured out a workable fusion drive. You'd still need to launch them from space since they're a little spicy from a "don't stand downwind" perspective, but unimaginably better than using nukes against pusher.
- jerf 3mo agoThere are other possible fission options that don't involve detonating actual bombs out the back of the rocket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_propulsion#Spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_propulsion#Spacecraft I'm a fan of the nuclear lightbulb myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket#Closed_cycle_designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket#Closed... Sometimes I think that while it may be appealing to mine gold or platinum or whatever out of the solar system, what people really need to figure out how to do is mine uranium. While I could advocate with a straight face that maybe we need to freak out a bit less about lifting the occasional few dozen pounds of uranium into orbit, and point out that more radioactive material has already been launched than people realize, it is fair to observe that we probably can't afford to make lifting hundreds of pounds of fission fuel into orbit the sort of routine event it needs to be to really have a space civilization. One of the biggest major issues with any sort of space habitation is access to dense energy sources. You can smooth over a lot of other problems and get a lot more slack in the system if you have a lot of energy available to play with. Part of the challenge with current space technology is that you start out on the very edge of feasibility as it is.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jebarker 3mo agoThis is a really enjoyable read. Majiec is a great writer and speaker. A breath of fresh air compared much of modern blog/essay content.
- troybetz 3mo agoWhere modern is post 2000 not 2020! https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day.htm https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day.... https://idlewords.com/2014/07/sana_a.htm https://idlewords.com/2014/07/sana_a.htm
- simonw 3mo agoI revisit https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_... every few years. Also a big fan of https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
- jaggederest 3mo agoArgentina on two steaks a day is quite possibly one of the best pieces of humorous writing, full stop. In my opinion at least, it should be regarded in company with Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, though maybe not at the head of that particular table.
- klausa 3mo agoThat post is single-handedly responsible for me going to Buenos Aires. (Well that and a Qatar Airways misprice a couple of years back; but I would not have been motivated to jump on that occasion if I had not read the post.)
- titanomachy 3mo ago“Pez dispenser for Armageddon” is incredible imagery
- 3mo ago
- MarkusQ 3mo ago> There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket. You don't say.
- anitil 3mo ago> probably the biggest drawback of nuclear pulse propulsion is the thousands of nuclear bombs The more you know
- nicbou 3mo agoNote: there is a paywall much later in the post, but even the free part is a wonderful read.
- GoatOfAplomb 3mo agoI think this set a record for me on how much article was available before the paywall.
- idlewords 3mo agoI am trying to be friendly with the paywall.
- nicbou 3mo agoIt might be worth a heads up, but your writing is excellent and you totally get to ask for payment.
- idlewords 3mo agoThank you! I realize people have subscription fatigue, and that on this site in particular there's a culture of expecting to read the full text of everything for free. So I try to make the previews substantive enough for people to participate in discussion whether or not they sign up. I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!
- foobarian 3mo agoArticle briefly talked about delivery, which is tricky to do precisely at best of times, but didn't really mention how to address delivery into a nuclear blast. Hundreds of meters behind the craft about once a second doesn't seem like it would be enough time for the blast to clear so would get in the way of sending a new capsule backward. Anyway I'm sure it's just an implementation detail
- jcs 3mo agoIn a vacuum, there isn’t a fireball hanging around for the next charge to cross; the plasma is moving outward at thousands of km/s.
- idlewords 3mo agoA lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.
- jaggederest 3mo agoThe blast clears that quickly in the atmosphere because the shockwave and debris move at-or-faster-than the speed of sound, so a few hundred meters is tenths of a second or less. You sit inside the mushroom cloud, of course, but the important part is gone quickly. The Rapatronic camera was used to take these kinds of pictures, and you can see that the actual blast front is around 20 meters across after 1 millisecond (!!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapatronic_camera
- pfdietz 3mo agoI've thought that if this idea is picked up it would have to be in space. Testing the rocket on the surface of the moon (point the plate straight up) would probably have been necessary anyway. Ordinary chemical rockets can be tested on the Earth's surface, this concept, not so much. This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabitants want to mine it for plutonium in the naturally radiation-soaked landscape that is the lunar surface, let them.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- IAmBroom 3mo ago> This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
- pwg 3mo agoAnd set the stage for "Space 1999"'s lunar escape from earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_1999
- polynomial 3mo agoNice set design, but honestly unwatchable. An accidental testament to the genius of ST:TOS.
- pfdietz 3mo agoYou need to think more clearly about this. Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth. Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.
- semiquaver 3mo ago[flagged]
- budsniffer952 3mo ago[flagged]
- badc0ffee 3mo agoWe must have different definitions of the word "related".
- psadri 3mo agoA version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.
- kurthr 3mo agoIt is more similar to the Medusa method. Lots of ideas have been proposed. One problem is getting the nukes prepositioned (and they won't easily stay in one spot!) with chemical rockets is quite challenging (rather than carrying them and launching them along the way) and also they would actually need to be set in groups of 3 to provide balanced forces along an axis, or alternately along a parabolic helix to compensate for directional errors. https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/04/17/medusa-deep-space-via-nuclear-pulse/ https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/04/17/medusa-deep-space...
- sushisource 3mo agoWould they? Why not just shape your ship like a big torus so as you fly the bombs go right through your central axis?
- kurthr 3mo agoI think there were big reflectors in the book, but it's been years since I read it. It's the sail that would need to be toroidal and huge. I guess the better point is that, if you can always maneuver the bombs at EXACTLY the right point relative to the sail and they are are perfectly uniformly spherical, and you can orient the sail perfectly before hand, then you can balance on top of the nuclear pin and don't need a stabilizing concentric force.
- samatman 3mo agoWhy say 'brisance' when you could say 'jounce per ounce'.
- mayoff 3mo agoThis idea is a significant part of Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoAnathem was so chock full of interesting ideas, too bad the last parts of it were so rushed (or at least felt that way to me).
- lern_too_spel 3mo agoThat's most of Stephenson's books. 90% world building and then 10% story at the end.
- p1necone 3mo agoThis worked for Snow Crash - felt like I went on a theme park ride, got to the end of it, and hopped off still buzzing. Doesn't work so well for something less tongue in cheek.
- jaggederest 3mo agoI always describe it as an excellent 300 page novel crammed into 900 pages.
- cfiggers 3mo agoStrong agree. I was especially disappointed because it felt like he was dropping breadcrumbs all through the book and then... Nah, none of that foreshadowing mattered. The central tension of the book is handled by an off-screen deus ex machina, actually, everybody go home. Incredible ideas. Really, really lousy ending.
- woadwarrior01 3mo agoI think NERVA and its Soviet equivalent RD-0410 were much more practical and plausible. Unlike Orion which was complete vaporware, both these projects reached the ground test prototype stage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0410 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0410
- NoImmatureAdHom 3mo agoNERVA / RD-0410 are basically like chemical rockets but better (maybe 800s specific impulse, vs. 300 for a chemical rocket). In contrast, Orion was 6,000s to maybe 100,000 theoretically.
- gonight 3mo agoThe writer had me at "Nuke Florida 200 times".
- helterskelter 3mo agoStill not enough.