Homer Hickam Speaks Out For Fission Rockets 424
jonerik writes: "Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam (perhaps best known for his 1998 memoir "Rocket Boys," which was turned into the 1999 motion picture "October Sky") has this article in Technology Review in which he advocates that the U.S. revive its nuclear rocket program of the '50s and '60s, arguing that nuclear-powered rockets are the only realistic way of opening up the rest of the solar system - particularly Mars - to human exploration."
Unfortunately (Score:2, Insightful)
Energy needs, not exploration for its own sake (Score:3, Insightful)
that's nice (Score:5, Insightful)
The major objections then, as now, are:
- What happens if fission powered rockets crash? Instant nuclear disaster, unless the containment vessel holds (and it might, but the public will not be convinced it would).
- Other countries fears that fission powererd rockets are actually orbiting nuclear weapons, able to be dropped on them at will. And again, even if they weren't bombs, orbiting fission rockets would be nuclear weapons: all you have to do is build the containment vessel so it can be blown apart on impact via conventional explosives, leaving a cloud of contamination.
I don't predict these space nukes are coming any time soon. Better to invest in laser propultion and linear magnetic launchers.
Re:that's nice (Score:2, Insightful)
Why on earth would somebody use fission powered rockets for low orbit transit? The mass and $$$ savings are only worth the hassle on long distance space travel. The focus of the article was on sending missions across the solarsystem, not to the international spacestation.
Re:Good Idea, just won't happen anytime soon (Score:4, Insightful)
But this would be perfect -- sure, you'd be making more nuclear waste, but you'd be sending it into space in the process! That's not hard to understand.
I think there is every reason to worry about dangers, though. Rockets do blow up (with current technology) and if they had radioactive materials onboard that would mean many, many deaths (mostly indirectly through increased cancer).
I imagine that nuclear rockets could be considerably safer than chemical rockets, since my vague impression is that they wouldn't be as explosive. But many of the standard ways that nuclear reactors are made safe -- mostly through containment of various sorts -- would be hard to do in a rocket.
He has a point (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good Idea, just won't happen anytime soon (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, people are so freaked out about anything with the word "nuclear" or "reaction" attached to it
News flash, public: The Sun, our source of life and energy, is "Nuclear". In fact, it's just one big "Reaction".
To quote TMBG, "The sun is a mass of incadescent gas, a firey nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees."
~z
Perfectly Serious (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing a couple of critical points:
In short, there are huge advantages to a nuclear rocket over a chemical rocket. Check out NERVA and NIMF, the two best treatments of the subject.
Da Shuttle (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fission? He's GOT to be kidding! (Score:4, Insightful)
"During his long NASA career, Mr. Hickam worked in propulsion, spacecraft design, and crew training, and won many awards including the Astronaut Office's coveted Silver Snoopy award for his outstanding support of the astronaut corps, and a special commendation for overall excellence from the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. His specialties at NASA included training astronauts on science payloads, and extravehicular activities (EVA). He also trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J (the first Japanese astronauts), and the Solar Max repair mission. Prior to his retirement in 1998, Mr. Hickam was the Payload Training Manager for the International Space Station Program."
Mike Eckardt: [orbitalhabitat.com]
"Like many of you, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young. It wasn't the glamor of a high profile, high risk job. It was the adventure. I lost that dream sometime during my teen years, when I realized that I wasn't enough of a Superman to join America's astronaut corps. But hope springs eternal. With the increasing availability of space flight in the 21st century, and the advent of a commercial tourist industry in space, I may yet manager to make my way into the high frontier."
Thanks for your input Mike. We'll get back to you.
-Rothfuss
Oh my God, I'm so affraid! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, you mean like Chernobyl? Not to make light of 100 or so deaths, but there are worse things in the world. It's hard to get worse than Chernobyl: Big core with high burn-up (that's lots of fision products from running), Zero containment, chemical explosions and fire at ground level.
Or perhaps you were thinking of all of the thousands of above ground nuclear bomb tests that the people have performed?
- Other countries fears that fission powererd rockets are actually orbiting nuclear weapons, able to be dropped on them at will. And again, even if they weren't bombs, orbiting fission rockets would be nuclear weapons: all you have to do is build the containment vessel so it can be blown apart on impact via conventional explosives, leaving a cloud of contamination.
Holy Armagedon, Batman! Do you think that this is a more practical means of nuking your friends than the tens of thousands of purpose built warheads lying around?! What shall we do?
I suggest we quit fooling around with bullshit fears and get some good use out of Nuclear technology. Projects Kiwi and NERVA were technical sucesses killed by ludite nonsense. We can go to Mars, we can exploit the solar system and we should do so. The sooner the beter, population expands geometricaly. We can use nukes to solve our problems peacefully, or we will use them the other way as we run out of exploitable resourses here. Chose your children's future.
Interstellar trips (Score:1, Insightful)
That's still 400 years to the NEAREST star. What are the chances of better technology being developed before you get there?
I'm sorry (Score:3, Insightful)
The best a chemical rocket can do is get up to speed (burning up all its propellant in the process) and then drift to its destination, like a car coasting down the highway with its engine off. What's needed are space drives that will provide a constant velocity.
As any high school physics student will tell you, burning up your fuel and then "coasting" the rest of the way means that you're at a constant velocity. Velocity is a vector, with two components: Speed and direction. In space, there's no (significant) drag or friction, and so your velocity is constant. If you were to keep burning fuel, you would keep accelerating (assuming an infinite amount of fuel) which anybody will tell you is not a good thing when you eventually want to stop.
I see no reason to listen to somebody talk about physics when he clearly has no respect for the language.
Re:Good Idea, just won't happen anytime soon (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power could solve lots and lots of energy problems, and really bring down total cost of electricity. Plenty of nations have nuclear power as their primary source of electricity (france, for instance). If electricity prices really dropped, and battery technology got better, we could finally have lots of electric cars. Lots of electric cars means we could break the grasp of OPEC and all those other nations which control U.S. interests in oil. All I see in nuclear power is profit for everyone.
And, because i know it's coming, a rocket, laden with radioactive material, that explodes and scatters nuclear waste, would probably increase cancer rates about as much as the huge plumes of smoke that we dump into our atmosphere by burning all those chemicals to get into space using conventional fuels.
Re:A clean energy source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, how about.. (Score:1, Insightful)
The Russians have technology of building things in very cold weather (permafrost in and above the Artic circle), and we have much of the hardware tech needed.
The way things are between us and the Russians, perhaps we could get along on this project. However, we need Financial backing of corporations. Governments are usually known to squander away our money without anything to show for it. A few Corps. will fix the government bloat.
The main reason suggesting Antartica is that even-if a nuclear shuttle does go the way of Challenger, Who's it going to hurt? The drift radiation would be surely no more than usually gotten in cosmic ray bombardment (70 rad/year).
actually ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I learn more about nukes from then than from the average government or industry nuclear supporter.
Re:Been there, done that (Score:2, Insightful)
What a dishonest article (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear engines are much more dangerous than chemical ones.
If a chemical rocket develops problems on ascent ground control push a button and blow it up.
What if that rocket has a shitload of uranium or plutonium on board?
We have sent nuclear material up in rockets withsome nuclear powered stelites but they have a really negligable ammount of radiactive stuff in them, compared with what is needed for a mission to mars.
And if you think that rockets do not blow up on ascent any more you have not seen NASA's record recently.
So there you have it - thats a risk that he did not mention although it is a very relevant factor. Now you may say - the risk is not that great, or it is worth it, but it should have been mentioned in an honest article.
And also the thing he said about getting energy from space is such BS. If he knows as much about nuclear power as he pretends to he should know that we have enough uranium to give us energy for a loooong time and nuclear powerplants are much safer than nuclear rockets.
Re:A clean energy source? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes it is. It is the cleanest source of practical energy currently known to man. Even cleaner than solar and wind, when the construction wastes are included (for example, all the chemical processes used in the construction of P-N photocells).
The mining, production and disposal of nuclear material makes it one of the more dangerous forms of energy production
Ha! The only way this argument could even begin to be valid is if you were only counting radioactive wastes. And FWIW, a coal-burning electricity plant puts out more radioactives into the environment in a single hour of operation than a nuke plant does in its entire operating lifetime.
Re:that's nice (Score:3, Insightful)
All launches would benefit from a thrust to weight ratio perspective. He did mention that if Hydrogen gas were used there would be some radioactive fallout from the gas. I imagine that would be from neutron reactions with the Hydrogen breeding tritium and deuterium as the Hydrogen is blased out of the reactor. Use of Helium instead would be less efficient but not result in any appreciable nuetron activation.
Re:A clean energy source? (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people have died due to gasoline fires? Oil well mishaps? The fact that people can be harmed by a technology is not a good reason to not pursue the technology. As with everything, we must minimize the risk and get on with life. As you say, no human activity is 100% failsafe. We are now, and will continue to produce nuclear material. The amount of nuclear material used in rockets will be very small compared to the amount used in power plants worldwide.
A fundamental design requirement of any nuclear reactor is that it must survive re-entry intact. Nuclear fallout is simply unacceptable. Tests can be performed. Take the reaction vessel, fill it with a volatile liquid, and drop it out the ISS airlock. If none of the liquid escapes and the vessel is recovered intact, then it's good enough to house nuclear material.Again, this is simply a design requirement, and not a good argument to stop all development of nuclear rockets.
-- Bob
Re:Oh my God, I'm so affraid! (Score:3, Insightful)
A line from "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge that stays with me is the one about Earth having been resettled from scratch three or four times since mankind achieved starflight. Each previous incarnation of civilization having been destroyed for one reason or another.
Bad Idea, here's why-- (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, the atmospheric reentry of one lost rocket schlepping clicking-hot material up the well can lead to the atomization and dispersal of that material in the atmosphere, transforming the earth into a mutants' menagerie.
The Space Shuttle has experienced a lower failure rate than the rest of US launchers, about one in one hundred [fotuva.org].
There was an uproar a few years ago, about the Cassini probe. That probe, containing over 32 KG of plutonium, was lifted by a launcher which, at the time, had a one in twenty failure rate, and was due for another.
Additionally, there have already been three catastrophic failures of launchers with plutonium-containing payloads, resulting in world-wide atmospheric dispersal of a hundreds of curies worth of plutonium.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the idea nuclear power or fission-powered space travel. But there remain serious development before it becomes considerably safer. This isn't a marketing campaign, you can't convince knowledgeable people with images of spouting teapots, not when life on this planet is at risk. Nor will risk management white-wash keep people from realizing there's a definite, likely risk that people will die from an accident. [I work in risk management.]
So, what's more important, do we need to do this now, now, now? Or can it wait a decade or three, until we have nuke power better figured out? My vote is to wait a bit.
Re:What a dishonest article (Score:5, Insightful)
But why would we want to blow it up? It's not like it's full of rocket fuel or anything - it just has some radioactive stuff in it. The radioactive stuff is solid, and even if we make a full-acceleration nosedive into basalt (which we won't, because all we have to do to stop the thrust is dump the reaction mass, not to mention parachutes), the worst that's going to happen (assuming decent reactor design, like a pebble bed reactor, if they scale that small) is that you get a few chunks of radioactive material; there isn't enough energy involved to get a pulverizing effect. Men with geiger counters go find it and clean it up.
Nuclear rockets are safer than chemical rockets (provided that the reaction mass used is something basically low-energy, like CO2 or H2O, rather than H2 or H2O2). It's like the difference between a low-pressure solar steam engine and a dragster running on nitromethanol, and you're asking about what to do if the steam engine catches fire because of the flaming exhaust it doesn't have. The risk of boost-phase abort requiring the destruction of the craft in atomic rockets is very, very low.
If you want to have something to attack nuclear rocketry on, look into on what effect the very slightly radioactive exhaust trails will have in the ionosphere. Man-made Van Allen belts? Could be, if there's enough energy. Would there be? What would those do? How radioactive would each particle of reaction mass be? How many of them would there be, and what would happen to them, during the atomic rocket's atmospheric boost phase? What kind of reactor would it have? What are this reactor's modes of failure? Is there a reactor that is, by design, immune to modes of failure we want to be particularly concerned about?
Not all of these questions were addressed by Hickam, either, but that doesn't make the article dishonest.
Re: about overbreeding, and stupidity. (Score:2, Insightful)
A common indian women was asked "how many children will you have ?"
she said:
"I've had 4 kids, 3 already died, I want to have about 10, and I expect 2 to survive"
this is a very rational probablistic view, not a stupid women at all.
the indians as a nation ARE stupid, since they allow the situation to reach this point, but the "common" people are usually not stupid when it concerns their own survival, or they wouldn't be so common.
and wether you like it or not, it IS your problem, since hungry people bite harder.
(note I don't say sending rice or whatever is a solution, I believe technological and political methods must be used jointly, with threat of force when needed, but in any case, it IS your problem)
Re:Interstellar trips (Score:2, Insightful)