Nuclear Powered Spaceshuttle

[deanmine]

Nuclear Bombs and Shuttles: The Plausibility of propelling a Craft by Nuclear Explosions

Space shuttles use chemical rockets as a means of propulsion. Unfortunately, this type of rocket propulsion has a rather serious weakness: it can’t make a space shuttle go at high speeds for very long. Although the Space Shuttle Atlantis reached a top speed of 28,292 km/h, it would still take it about 80 days to reach Mars. And that’s assuming that Mars is at its closest distance from Earth, which would be about 54.6 million km. That’s a relatively short time frame, but let us not forget that the Solid Rocket Boosters from the space shuttle last for about 6 minutes until they run out of fuel. In short, to travel really far distances, one would need a pair of Solid Rocket Boosters too big to be practical.

Luckily, there are more types of propulsion a space shuttle may use. One type of propulsion system is known as Nuclear Pulse Propulsion. NPP is able to accelerate a shuttle anywhere from 4% to 15% the speed of light by using nuclear bombs. Before delving into the specifics of NPP, let’s go back in time, to the 1940s, when the idea of NPP originated.

During 1946, Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish-American mathematician famous for participating in the Manhattan Project, proposed an experiment in which nuclear bombs could accelerate an object to very high speeds. In 1958, The Los Alamos Laboratory made a top-secret project, codenamed Project Orion, to test out Ulam’s theories.

Unfortunately, Project Orion was cancelled in 1963 due to the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. This treaty proposed that the only testing of nuclear explosions may occur underground, effectively killing off the idea behind Project Orion, which was sending a small spacecraft to space by using NPP.

So, how would it work? The explosion from any explosive generates a shock wave that (given enough force) pushes apart everything it comes in contact with. A grenade has a shock wave, but it doesn’t release a shock wave large enough to even jettison a large truck. Nuclear bombs, however, have the ability to create shock waves that are able to annihilate entire cities (effectively leveling them). Along these lines, if an explosion occurs from behind an object, that object should be hit by the shock wave and obtain some impulse out of it.

There is, however, a big con to NPP systems: the high amount of nuclear fallout a nuclear bomb produces. When conducting nuclear experiments, one does not generally want to harm or kill researchers via radiation poisoning. Project Orion’s implementation would have posed a risk to the lives of at least a few hundred people. Moreover, it would be difficult to ensure that the radiation did not leak into the shuttle and harm the passengers.

Thus, a space shuttle that uses NPP will need to have a very resilient set of shock absorbers and a large, concave-down plate in order for it to “take” as much of the shock wave as possible. Despite these drawbacks, making a system that could effectively use this method of propulsion would be amazing. If a space shuttle that uses NPP detonates a nuke from behind it every 100 meters for a consecutive amount of time, then the end result will be a shuttle that may be even able to travel to Proxima Centauri (the closest star to our solar system) within a human life-span!

[Zahir82]

Cool post!

[Kanda444]

much better idea than nuclear aircraft...



^^ these fuckers would have had to be followed around by a cleanup crew just in case it crashed... which would cause a lot of nuclear pollution.

[deanmine]

wait i got one ull like.... i just need to find the articals.. and how to spell it... awroa project .. hold up...

[deanmine]

been around in the "black" project world for years. so they say

[deanmine]

im not kidding .. i live in southern cali... and for like five years .. five years .. every other thursday at 10am there was a "shake" i have to re-look to see what day and for how long. but im sayin it was a predictable thing

[Kanda444]

Originally Posted by deanmine

wait i got one ull like.... i just need to find the articals.. and how to spell it... awroa project .. hold up...

aurora project? the mythical plane (i wish was real)?

when i lived in Portland, we heard this bizzare sounding plane (fighter jets, air liners and experimental aircraft used to fly over head daily so it wasnt to odd to hear unusual aircraft) so my wife went to check it out... she yell out to me telling me i 'had to see this', so i went out back and there was a contrail that looked like this:



that's not a picture of it... i didnt have my camera at the time but it looked just like that. super interesting to me....not sure what it was.

where i live now is near an AFB and we have seen experimental military aircraft tested here before... nothing too exciting but one had a huge pod on the front that (i was told by people i know on the base) was a test housing for a direct energy weapon (laser) not sure how much truth there is to that but...i can see that as being possible.

[deanmine]

l.a. to ny in ten min flat!!

[deanmine]

wind patterns have been made that make similar effects to vapor... but not exactly

[Kanda444]

Originally Posted by deanmine

wind patterns have been made that make similar effects to vapor... but not exactly

they are also made by nuclear aircraft some claime... which are said to not exist (and are especially dangerous to fly over large cities)



that's an NB-36H.... has a nuclear reactor on board.

honestly, i think the contrail pattern comes more from the prop than anything but i thought it would be fun to throw that in here just to stir shit up a bit.