NASA Looks At Reviving Atomic Rocket Program (newatlas.com) 122
Big Hairy Ian shares a report from New Atlas: When the first manned mission to Mars sets out, it may be on the tail of an atomic rocket engine. The Space Race vintage technology could have a renaissance at NASA after the space agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama signed a contract with BWXT Nuclear Energy to develop updated Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) concepts and new fuel elements to power them.
Today, with NASA once again considering the challenges of sending astronauts to Mars, the nuclear option is back on the table as part of the agency's Game Changing Development program. Under this, NASA has awarded BMXT, which supplies nuclear fuel to the U.S. Navy, a $18.8-million contract running through September 30, 2019 to look into the possibility of developing a new engine using a new type of fuel. Unlike previous designs using highly enriched uranium, BMXT will study the use of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU), which has less than 20 percent of fissile uranium 235. This will provide a number of advantages. Not only is it safer than the highly enriched fuel, but the security arrangements are less burdensome, and the handling regulations are the same as those of a university research reactor. If NASA determines next month that the LEU engine is feasible, the project will conduct testing and refine the manufacturing process of the Cermet fuel elements over the course of a year, with testing of the full-length Cermet fuel rods to be conducted at Marshall.
Slashdot reader Big Hairy Ian adds: "At the very least it looks much more feasible than Project Orion."
Today, with NASA once again considering the challenges of sending astronauts to Mars, the nuclear option is back on the table as part of the agency's Game Changing Development program. Under this, NASA has awarded BMXT, which supplies nuclear fuel to the U.S. Navy, a $18.8-million contract running through September 30, 2019 to look into the possibility of developing a new engine using a new type of fuel. Unlike previous designs using highly enriched uranium, BMXT will study the use of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU), which has less than 20 percent of fissile uranium 235. This will provide a number of advantages. Not only is it safer than the highly enriched fuel, but the security arrangements are less burdensome, and the handling regulations are the same as those of a university research reactor. If NASA determines next month that the LEU engine is feasible, the project will conduct testing and refine the manufacturing process of the Cermet fuel elements over the course of a year, with testing of the full-length Cermet fuel rods to be conducted at Marshall.
Slashdot reader Big Hairy Ian adds: "At the very least it looks much more feasible than Project Orion."
Absolutely! (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at what a horrific disaster all those exploding reactors have been on navy ships and submarines!
When will people realize the horror of nuclear reactors! Radiation! Radiation!
Not to mention the ecological disaster that there would be if evil radiation were to leak in space!
Do people not realize it is the one truly pristine environment left?
Every single ONE of the radioactive RTGs that we have sent up on rockets has caused untold deaths! The chemical rockets on the other hand make rainbows brighter and butterflies more colourful!
The horror..
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Look at what a horrific disaster all those exploding reactors have been on navy ships and submarines!
It's the man, not the machine. Rickover is the man. The way Thresher imploded sounded like a pretty gruesome way to go, at least it was quick. I think it was that disaster that drove safety into the certification of the subs for a certain depth.
Not to mention the ecological disaster that there would be if evil radiation were to leak in space!
It would be a great use in space. Not so keen on them launching with them. Great that it's LEU, that engine would still be pretty hot coming back, so yeah as long as it stays in space it would be great.
Does anyone seriously think it's going to happen though?
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It would be a great use in space. Not so keen on them launching with them.
One word: Bluegill
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It would be a great use in space. Not so keen on them launching with them.
One word: Bluegill
Thanks, I forgot all about EMP.
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Look at what a horrific disaster all those exploding reactors have been on navy ships and submarines!
When will people realize the horror of nuclear reactors! Radiation! Radiation!
Remove the sensationalist word "exploding", and yes. Sunken nuclear subs [wikipedia.org] are a problem. Kursk, K-159 and Komsomolets are of concern to the Norwegians, and radioactive leaks are either already registered or are predicted to occur within a few years.
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I don't know where you get your "radioactive leaks" meme from.
Monitoring of those wrecks and of the three dumped reactors from the Lenin (nuclear icebreaker) have shown that radioactivity is barely detectable 50cm from the reactors and totally undetectable from 2 metres away
The Lenin reactors in particular have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the years because they lie very close to Norwegian territorial waters and they were/are rightfully worried about them.
So far the concensus is "leave them where
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Look at what a horrific disaster all those exploding reactors have been on navy ships and submarines!
Look at how much crew you have to dedicate to a reactor, and how inefficient it has to be, before it can be reliable.
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Not to mention the ecological disaster that there would be if evil radiation were to leak in space!
Do people not realize it is the one truly pristine environment left?
I can see that you are no scientist because your facts are wrong. Radiation is a natural phenomenon in the environment on Earth and in Space. We need to avoid being exposed to too much radiation because that can kill.
Space can have high levels of radiation depending on how close you get to the source. The main source of radiation in the solar system is the Sun and you would die without the radiation from the Sun. The Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere help to prevent damaging radiation from hitting the E
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Whoosh.
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Sadly out of points or I'd mod you up! Someone else on /. with science experience/knowledge!
Re:What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Come on. You can die even if you strap yourself behind a horse. You remind me of people who said (about 2 centuries ago) that going over 40 km/hours kills a human.
Speed doesn't kill
Acceleration may kill (solution, don't accelerate beyond harmful limits).
Radiation may kill (shield yourself).
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No. This sounds like a solid core nuclear rocket. Like NERVA or Dumbo. It's not that different from a plain old nuclear reactor. There's a core with the uranium rods in the middle inside an enclosed metal shell which heats the liquid hydrogen or liquid ammonia reaction mass outside that then gets ejected outwards. The only way it would leak radiation is if the metal containment failed and even then it would be a much lower level of radiation than a nuclear explosion. It would be more akin to a nuclear power
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- Tungsten Cermet Reactors [slideserve.com] presentation.
- Dumbo: A pachydermal rocket motor [nasa.gov] paper.
Everything could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Exactly.
What could go wrong ?
Rockets have, at best, 98% reliability (Using old and proven tech, new one is muuch wooorse.).
that means that 2% of the time, they explode and get dispersed in the atmosphere, low or high, soon or late.
So it's a very very very very very very bad idea to send fissile material to orbit and then to escape velocities.
(the small quantities of the mars rovers and similar RTG powered probes are only comparable to a very weak Hiroshima in mass)
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What could go wrong ?
Rockets have, at best, 98% reliability (Using old and proven tech, new one is muuch wooorse.).
that means that 2% of the time, they explode and get dispersed in the atmosphere, low or high, soon or late.
So it's a very very very very very very bad idea to send fissile material to orbit and then to escape velocities.
This has already happened, on more than one occasion. Yet we're still here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You know the US alone has fired off about 10,000 Hiroshima equivalents worth of nuclear bombs in testing right?
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Yep. 90% underground
And yet, the remaining 10% tests badly contaminated the earth.
Now this rocket disintegrating would be much worse.
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I couldn't find any totals broken down by type of test, and I don't really want to add them all up, but about 20% of US shots were atmospheric, and it looks like most of the multi-megaton bombs were atmospheric. Quite a bit more than your 10%.
"Badly contaminated" seems similarly hyperbolic. The tests were detectable, and you didn't want to be downwind of them for sure, but except in those limited areas they don't seem to have been too catastrophic. I'm not sure why you'd say a rocket disintegrating would
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Fission designs have the advantage that a crew could be 'shaded' from solar flares by the heavy-isoptope fuel load. The ship's safe room would be positioned to exploit this effect.
Launched from where? (Score:2)
Re:Launched from where? (Score:5, Informative)
There are interesting developments in this area. For example, Kilopower ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) is aimed to replace RTGs since Pu-238 is becoming too scarce. It will produce about 4kW of thermal energy and will be completely passively regulated by natural thermal expansion of components - no moving parts required whatsoever.
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Not to dismiss the technology there (tungsten cermet sounds cool -- or perhaps the opposite of that :-) but "nothing that is not found in nature" ain't in itself reassuring.
After all, asbestos [wikipedia.org] is readily found in nature, too. Paracelsus, dosis and that.
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Low enriched uranium means a much larger(heavier) reactor core for the same thrust. So you spend much more to launch it and get much lower cargo capacity.
Good return on investment - but not for us (Score:2)
Why else is a company that has had nothing to do with rocketry of any kind doing this instead of NASA, the Air Force or a University?
It's kind of sad because it would be nice to see an atomic rocket instead of vanishing pork money funding a very expensive undergraduate level literature survey.
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More likely it is about producing large amounts of energy is space to use rather than chucking crap out the back to make you go. Chuck stuff out the back and you might as well be using elastic bands with rocks as fuel, you know how old rockets really are and we are still using that technology, really quite embarrassing. Engines to be used in space might well look nothing like what you are expecting, especially if they are designed to project fields outwards, blades, rather than inwards, cones. Energy is key
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Those political donations from BWX really paid off!
At first, I kinda thought you were trolling, but then there's this:
https://www.opensecrets.org/pa... [opensecrets.org]
WHAM! (Score:2)
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! /Why not vacation in beautiful Bellingham, Washington?
.
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WOW! You must be as old as I am to remember the old 'bang-bang' propulsion system of the REAL ORION spacecraft -lol-
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Or a 1985 Niven/Pournelle science fiction novel.
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$0.10 book sale at the local library.
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WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! /Why not vacation in beautiful Bellingham, Washington?
.
While it's still there.
Project Orion Is feasable (Score:2)
NASA Looks At Reviving Atomic Rocket Program (Score:2)
FINALLY !
It's been about 50 years that the NERVA program has been on hold - mostly because of the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaties of the time, and also the space nuclear bans related to those test bans.
Check out these 2 sites / articles for some history of a WORKING nuclear powered rocket engine - - -
NERVA testing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
and - http://www.daviddarling.info/e... [daviddarling.info]
I was in high school, and missed out on actually seeing one of the tests at Jackass Flats in early 1967 because I wa
Spent fuel rods recycling (Score:1)
Can the engines run on reprocessed spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors?
Politically possible? (Score:2)
Nuclear thermal is a nice technology for some missions (but probably not Mars where the delta-V isn't all that high). The problem is that I don't see it as political realistic. There are political issues with radioisotope generators on deep space probes - for example the proposed Europa lander will have a very limited lifetime because it will only have chemical batteries.
I think a NTR could be launched safely if it hasn't been turned on yet, but I also think that there is not a snowballs chance in hell o
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If only people would stop giving money to scientifically ignorant, no that's not fair... scientifically combative organizations like Green Peace, we could move forward. Green Peace and Sierra Club combat things like this because they want more money and they keep frightening people into thinking they're bad. Anything is bad if it's not used right. Just like the Japs with their power plants. Not just one, Three nuke plants in an area known for being flooded and the dimwits put the generators in the basement
University research reactor... (Score:2)
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Imagine the scene, the reactor's cooling system is failing, and your malfunctioning miracle-working brain decides it's time to clean the storage closet instead!
Chain Reaction [amzn.to] was one of my favorite Keanu Reeves movie.
Thorium (Score:1)
Why is thorium never consider. It is a safer fuel, liquid in reactor use, easy to contain when things go bad, being a liquid you can drain it off into several containment vessels and the waste product much easier to contain as most of it is lead.
Why? Same reason we use uranium; can't make a bomb. Almost all thorium byproducts are at the end of the fission scale, but Thorium is fairly easy to find in nature; easier than uranium.
Hell the lead might make good ejection mass for a ship in flight. Solar wind woul
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232-U neutron absorption ensures no 233-U reactor will ever be self-sustaining supercritical.
Failed tech won't get us to Mars or anywhere else.
Seems to me intuitively (Score:2)
Economics of chemical flight still limit (Score:2)
Nuclear engines do not have higher specific impulse than LH2-LOx and thus, the reaction mass will be GREATER and require a larger chemical rocket to hit LEO.
Thus a nuclear engine will have to be a low delta-v ion/magnetic drive.
So, reaction mass will go up separately, on Chemical rockets and will be even MORE expensive.
$18.8 million (Score:2)
I was only just reading about this today... (Score:2)
Payback for Donations? (Score:2)
You be the judge...
https://www.opensecrets.org/pa... [opensecrets.org]
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Go watch the Boondocks, most black people know all about the lunacy of the left and the contradiction between modern money-making black "pop culture", and Martin Luther King's noble and righteous motives and goals.
MLK envisioned a future where people would be judged by the quality of their character, rather than the colour of the skin. A "colour-blind society" where people would succeed based on hard work, honesty and justice for all. He never said anything about silencing people who were white from speakin
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yeah, 20 billion. nasa budget. thats UGE ! that's about 1/1000 th of the DOD's budget.
Re:Simple Question (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm replying as AC because I modded-up this and I think questions like this should be answered from time to time, even though I disagree with the apparent sentiments.
Firstly, "paying down the national debt" isn't necessarily as useful as one might think. Certainly, avoiding indebtedness to foreign powers may be of strategic importance, and rapid expansion of national debt for big spending programs might stoke high inflation that drives economic instability. However, most of the national debt (along with most money in the economy) is funded with money that has been created from thin-air by private-sector banks, and perhaps laundered through the economy to look more real than it is. Paying-off the original debts that created the money causes it to disappear with the debt but it provides profit in the form of interest for the banks that created the money in the first place. Very little actually goes to cover capital and interest for the deposits of any real investors, and even those originated mostly in debt to generate new assets that have been laundered and liquidated into cash for deposit. This is the world of fractional reserve banking, where almost all money in the system is born out of debt and inflation.
Now to the main point about why do this instead of "more worthwhile things we could be doing, such as curing cancer, solving world hunger, or reducing our impacts on climate change". Of course those are important and, quite rightly a good deal more money –many billions of dollars– already goes into those things than the 19 million dollars going into this project.
But blue-sky technology and pure science reap huge benefits in the long term and that simply can't be foreseen. Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Newton were concerned with the motions of planetary bodies and the moon. They paved the way for the foundations of the science of mechanics which is one of the pillars of all of modern engineering and science. Franklin, Faraday and many others tinkered with electricity and magnetism, and Maxwell synthesised a theory from their experiments which gave another of pillar foundations of everything we have now. Even the highly abstract theories of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, formulated a century ago, now have a big impact on our everyday lives.
Everything I've described (albeit in a very brief and shallow manner) is the basis for things like MRI, CT and PET scanners, computational drug discovery, understanding climate change, GNSS/GPS and countless other technologies that have the power to benefit everyone. There are bigger political decisions to be made that will have more impact than anything gained by switching funding from atomic rockets to feeding the starving. Consider the cost of building a 2000-mile wall. And if you want another perspective, consider that, in the US alone, about $200 billion is spent each year on advertising.
Personally I have no desire to move to Mars; it's way more hostile than America would have been for early settlers, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't invest a relatively small amount. One can't imagine the long-term benefits that humanity might eventually reap from the effort.
I haven't bothered with references but if you're curious and if you really care you can easily find plenty to read about any of this.
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"Paying-off the original debts that created the money causes it to disappear with the debt but it provides profit in the form of interest for the banks that created the money in the first place."
If you could direct me to this bank that only makes money in interest if you pay off a loan, I would be most appreciative.
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"How does sending a few people to Mars affect anyone's life in a meaningful way?"
Mmmh, depends on who you send. I'd think that sending some orange 'astronaut' to Mars would benefit billions of people on earth.
Re: Get NASA out of rockets altogether (Score:1)
It's a study into feasibility, not a launch program. Presumably, given Musk's talk of Mars, SpaceX is also doing a study and the can be compared. It's pretty normal to look at multiple options for something so bold, before committing, or taking on faith the first organisation to say they can do it. SpaceX has no track record in deep space (NASA does), so I'd want to see a detailed work up from SpaceX too before signing a contract.
Re: Get NASA out of rockets altogether (Score:5, Informative)
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However, they work much better for non-Hohmann transfer orbits. Or non-lowest dV Hohmann transfer orbits. There are advantages to getting to Mars more quickly. Keeping the crew alive being one of them.
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The one I replied to? Saw it, thanks.
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Re:Get NASA out of rockets altogether (Score:5, Informative)
Even SpaceX admits that for more distant missions (far outer planet destinations, oort cloud, etc), scaling chemical rockets is not sufficient. Nuclear rockets are also interesting for Venus, delivering crew and payload between the habitable layer (~54km) where breathable air is a lifting gas that can loft a colony, and orbit. Some of Venus's great advantages, like having nearly Earthlike gravity and thus no concerns about wasting like exist for the moon and (to a lesser extent) Mars, are also disadvantages, in that it's also nearly Earthlike difficulty to get to orbit. Furthermore, unlike Mars where your rocket rests on the ground, with Venus you have to support its fully fueled mass. While it's possible to get out with two-stage chemical rockets and re-dock the returning stages, you get much better mass fractions with nuclear. Even though nuclear pretty much only works with hydrogen propellant (the ISP drops in linear proportion to the atomic mass of the propellant), and hydrogen is not particularly common on Venus, the low propellant requirements mean that a nuclear rocket can use less hydrogen than most low-hydrogen rocket propellants that could be used were the ascent vehicle a two-stage chemical rocket.
I'm sure lots of people are going to be discussing NERVA in this comments section. It's important to realize that NERVA is obsolete technology, and there are much better designs available at present. NERVA's biggest problem was its awful thrust to weight ratio. One of the first realizations since then was that you can make a nuclear rocket with a LOX "afterburner"; at liftoff, you use LOX to vastly augment the thrust (the resulting ISP, while nothing like pure hydrogen nuclear-thermal, is still well above that of normal hydrolox). Once the high liftoff thrust requirements are no longer needed, the rocket transitions to pure hydrogen thrust for much higher specific impulse.
A variety of airbreathing modes have also been investigated which can strongly increase thrust and/or specific impulse further - thrust augmentation, nuclear scramjets, nuclear-driven turbojets, etc. Also, there have been general improvements in nuclear technology to allow for transferring higher energies to the hydrogen steam since then, as well as a number of yet-to-be-proven concepts. For example a fission fragment reactor can theoretically get the hydrogen much hotter than the reactor itself; in such a system, the goal is to (as much as possible) capture only neutrons in the fuel and only thermalize fission fragments (which carry most of the energy) in the hydrogen. But you definitely wouldn't pursue a fission fragment reactor with LEU....
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Airbreathing modes? In open space nuclear designs could be the kings of specific impulse, but getting to LEO with one is going to be a lot more difficult, especially politically.
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NERVA was designed for operation in the atmosphere (it doesn't exhaust radioactive material). Also, Earth is not the only body in the solar system with an atmosphere.
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Certainly, but 'airbreathing' implies an oxygen-rich atmosphere. There is only one of those in the solar system.
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Airbreathing does not in any way, shape or form imply an oxygen-rich atmosphere. The most important aspect of air to a nuclear rocket is not oxygen, it's simply reaction mass.
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Even SpaceX admits that for more distant missions (far outer planet destinations, oort cloud, etc), scaling chemical rockets is not sufficient.
Well, on the Falcon Heavy page they list payload to Pluto and escape velocity is only 0.39 km/s [imgur.com] (0.03+0.02+0.11+0.20+0.03) more delta-v than that so anything inside the Sun's gravity well like the far outer planets is quite reachable by chemical. If you do ITS-style fueling in orbit or slingshot around Jupiter probably with a decent size payload too. The Oort cloud is a lot further out though, Voyager is at 139 AU and the lowest estimate for where it might begin is 2000 AU so like 500+ years even with all t
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Sure you can put a lump of metal anywhere in the solar system with chemical rockets. When you've got people riding along how long it takes tends to become more of a concern.
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"Instead of going to Mars, let's use our resources to do things that actually benefit people, such as stopping global warming. "
Mars is rather cool and could benefit from a bit of global warming.
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Re:Waste of Money (Score:4, Insightful)
If Humans were logical creatures we'd stop funding all military, form a planetary government, and stop all talk of Martian colonization since that's not required and diverts resources from social programs and science.
That makes sense if you look no farther than your navel, and plan for no later than next week. But on a long enough time scale, a rock is going to come along and wipe out our species, and we also develop ancillary technologies while figuring out how to explore space which pay dividends right here on Earth. Unfortunately, much of our leadership is just as short-sighted as you are.
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It's logical that we have divergent interests and therefore benefit from having more than one government, also as fallback when one fails.
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Tu pang, what?
I believe that's Klingon. Damned trekkies...