Thanks for the post Adam,
Couldn't view any more than six videos but that was fascinating. Here's another link
for a few other spacecraft designs you might like.
http://www.bisbos.com/rocketscience/spacecraft.html
Mark
Yes, I forgot about NERVA, which is the other highly plausible nuclear rocket design. It's a bit less ambitious than Orion but also might be considerably cleaner and safer.
But man, Orion would be like...
AWESOME!#$!! I'd love to see someone do a realistic render with realistic audio of what the launch would be like. I have trouble even imagining it. One nuke every 0.5 seconds launching a small city into orbit. It's probably the most spectacular manmade spectacle I can think of.
From what I've read about this amazing project, right now Orion has two huge problems that would prevent it from ever being built. One is fallout, and the other is the EMP damage it would render to satellites and electrical systems on the way up.
Fallout could be mitigated to some degree. Most people don't know this, but it is possible to design nuclear explosives that are cleaner. The kind of fallout you'd be most concerned about-- the dangerous long-lived kind-- occurs because of incomplete fission... in the same way that black smoke from poorly tuned diesel engines results from incomplete combustion. With modern computer modeling and modern super-explosives to compress the fissile mass, I'm sure you could maximize efficiency of the bombs and clean them up considerably over 1950s designs. You could also build bombs that had the absolute minimum amount of fissile material to ignite a fusion reaction and then throw in some deuterium to get the rest of the yield from fusion, which generates no fallout.
But the EMP is still a deal breaker. Launching from the middle of the pacific would mostly save power grids, but Orion would fry every satellite within line of sight on its way up. (LOL) The only way to mitigate this would be to essentially announce your intent to launch an Orion about 50 years in advance and then offer to help cover the cost of shielding all new satellites against EMP to make them "Orion launch safe." That would add a lot to the cost.
I think the thing to do would be to use conventional or maybe even NERVA type rockets to establish a base on the far side of the moon. Then you could build... especially with low Lunar gravity... a
huge Orion-type ship. You could build one out there big enough to be a generational ship and launch it to the stars. The moon would shield the EMP, and since the lunar gravity is lower you wouldn't have to quite as crazy with bombs in rapid secession either so the launch would be a lot safer.
The reason I posted this to the UFO forum is because it totally debunks the "you can't get there" baloney. You most certainly can, even without imaginary warp drives or wormholes. If you can do the propulsion with 1950s technology, I'm sure you could do a lot better with the equivalent of 2050s technology. I'm sure things like the pusher plate and the shock absorbers would be less hairy today with modern materials science.
We didn't build anything like this, but if things had gone different maybe we would have.
I can imagine an alternate world where we were
less warlike, which would have reduced the need for secrecy around the bombs and would have reduced the political problems plaguing the project. In that world, we might already have bases on the Moon and Mars.
We didn't... but maybe someone else did.
P.S. I got a bit sad watching the BBC documentary. I remember one thought going through my head: "it wasn't time... we weren't ready..." The way they had to dress it up like a stupid doomsday warship to beg for funding from the military made me sick. We don't deserve to explore the universe until we can stop letting ourselves be ruled by idiot ideologues and psychopaths.
I also can't let this go without posting my favorite Internet rant, which speaks a bit to what I said above:
Becoming effete (Steven B. Harris)
He gets it about half right, but leaves out the role that warmongering also had in stealing our future from us.
